


If Only For The Night

by Ylixia



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Colonist (Mass Effect), F/M, Interspecies Awkwardness, Interspecies Sex, Paragade (Mass Effect), Porn, War Hero (Mass Effect), Xenophilia, Xenophobia, fanfiction means never having to justify your fantasy alien dong choices, literally the backstory of every shepard I have ever played for the past ten years, really leaning into that xeno weirdness because what else is there, sparring is how turians flirt I don't make the rules, yet another pwp that turned into a meandering worldbuilding character exploration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 14:14:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14166657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ylixia/pseuds/Ylixia
Summary: “So what are your top three?”“Top three what?”“Top three rude-ass questions humans ask you.”“So you can avoid repeating the mistakes of your people?”“Hell no. I need to know what my competition is.”Shepard's never really been one to leave her comfort zone, but her unexpected transfer to the top-secret Normandy project means having to adjust to a whole slew of new people, new routines, and new rules.Fortunately "new" doesn't necessarily mean "bad", at least when it comes to a certain turian Spectre.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So. Wow. WOW.
> 
> I am so excited to share this fic. It's been in my heart for a long time and to finally have something I'm happy with is such a gift. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Title inspired by Florence and the Machine's [Only If For The Night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5NHMC78gIU), which I think of as something of a theme song for these two. (yes I changed the words around on purpose)

It’s been a while since Shepard’s been in a place big enough to just run. Treadmills don’t really count, not when she has to stare at the same patch of wall for thirty minutes just so she can get her cardio in. Pounding through the same-y metal hallways of the tiny corner of Arcturus she’s allowed to move around in isn’t all that much of an improvement but after a full week of sweet fuck all to do she’s on the verge of going completely batshit, so she’ll take her distractions where she can.

This early in the morning there’s not much anyone around, her body still stubbornly stuck on _Trafalgar_ time. Really she should have gotten her sleep schedule under control by now, but she’s been resisting it. It would make everything too real somehow, and then she’d have to accept the fact that she’s left her crew behind, probably for good, and they’ll have to keep going on without her. She’s being ridiculous, she knows she is, but it’s not as though she has a whole lot better to do than lie to herself right now.

Eventually, she knows she’s going to have to make an effort; get to know her new crew, their names, their habits. Get a feel for their quirks, their hangups, the way they navigate their relationships. A dozen little details she’ll need to weave together into a new team, one that won’t tear itself apart on long, cramped journeys through space. Probably she’ll end up liking a lot of them. Probably some will even be friends, but right now all she can think is that they aren’t _her_ friends, not _her_ crew and she just… she just can’t right now.

She’s so wrapped up in her sulk that when she rounds the bend to the small observation alcove and sees a turian standing there she nearly trips and falls on her face. On instinct she stumbles back out of line of sight, reaching for the sidearm that’s obviously not at her hip before her brain catches up to her body and she has to suppress the urge to smack herself across the face. She launches herself back into her run before the turian catches her stumbling around like a startled foal, but he probably heard her panicked tap dancing routine anyway. Goddamn it.

Her first instinct is to comm Anderson and let him know, but she dismisses that idea almost immediately. There’s no way in hell a turian agent _snuck_ into secure lockdown in the seat of Alliance military power just to stand and calmly look out the window, scaring the pants off innocent N7 marines that just happen to pass by. Technically, she’s supposed to report anything suspicious or out of place immediately, and technically one could make the argument that a turian on Arcturus station is by default both of those things, but Anderson’s pretty busy right now (unlike her), and she hates having her own time wasted too much to waste someone else’s. Also isn’t this whole project supposed to be a joint human/turian thing? It’s probably weirder that she hasn’t seen any other turians at all before now.

He’s still standing there on her second circuit, and her third, not so much as twitching a mandible when she runs by. On her fourth circuit she decides to pull up her big girl panties and go say hi.

It always manages to surprise her how scary turians are up close. And tall, christ. This guy’s seven feet if he’s an inch and in full armor, standing stock still and upright like he’s never so much as contemplated the idea of relaxation in his life. She wills her heart to beat just a little bit slower. She’s _fought_ plenty of turians before, but combat is an entirely different animal from making nice with an alien on what she can’t help but think of as home turf. It’s never been very surprising to her that First Contact went so poorly, not with how much the entire species resembles the monsters from old scifi vids. Now, if the asari had made first contact, maybe things would have been different — more Star Trek than Alien, so to speak.

Although knowing how trigger happy humans can be, maybe not.

“Commander Shepard,” she says by way of greeting. “Alliance Navy.”

The turian turns his head very slightly toward her. “Nihlus Kryik. Spectre.”

Shepard whistles. “No shit. Council checking up on our new girl?”

“Something like that.”

There’s a trick to talking with translators in person and Shepard doesn’t have it. Her brain kinda scrambles, trying to parse the unexpected deluge of information. It’s not like on vids where other languages are dimmed down to background audio with the english layered neatly over it. She can still clearly hear him speaking his own language, chirrups and lilting whistles and soft sibilants layered over a baseline rumble that sounds more like song than speech. The voice in her ear is deep and resonant, sounding remarkably natural with an additional flanging effect. She can just pick out the qualities in his true voice that the translator is using to color the english it’s feeding to her, and she’s so distracted trying to quantify what exactly it is that it takes her way longer to parse what he’s actually saying than it should.

Shepard blows out a breath and tries to pull her brain together. She’s tense and despite her best efforts her heart is still pounding in her chest. This is ridiculous. As much as part of her would appreciate the break in the monotony this guy is not about to attack her, and he’s not some monster who clawed his way out of her nightmares. He’s a person, and a pretty important one, and she needs to focus on not being a dick to him. It’s probably fucked up that a large part of her would rather be in a firefight right now.

She folds her arms and forces her muscles to relax one by one, leaning one hip on the ledge in front of the window. The ship is beautiful, but she can’t pull her gaze away from the turian’s profile. He’s got dramatic sweeping white markings that stand out starkly against the iron grey of his face plates, but somehow it’s the piercing green of his eyes that she finds the most striking. They’re small and intent and uncomfortable to look at for too long, so she doesn’t. She wonders if the body armor is a turian thing, a Spectre thing, or just a Nihlus Kryik thing. Certainly he can’t be expecting an attack in here. The pistol at his hip is definitely a Spectre thing; everyone else’s guns went straight into lockup the moment they stepped foot on the station.

_I should maybe be concerned that the only one allowed to be armed in here is the turian spy?_

“Waiting for me to do a trick?” Nihlus cuts through her woolgathering, the weird jangle of his actual-voice mixing with his translator-voice knocking her back off kilter. Translator voice sounds perfectly even, though she’s not sure how good it is at translating emotion and tone. His body language is aggressively neutral, though Shepard wouldn’t exactly put money on her ability to read that accurately either. He’s not actively thinking about shooting her and that’s about as much turian body language as she’s needed to know in the past.

“I’ve not really spoken to a turian before,” she says, half to herself. She wonders how her translator voice sounds to him.

“You’re doing more staring than speaking.” He doesn’t seem as handicapped by the discord as she is. But then, Spectres travel all over the galaxy for their work for the council, so he probably wouldn’t be.

Shepard laughs a little self deprecatingly. “Yeah, good point. Sorry, I guess I’m just curious.”

“How shockingly out of character for your species.”

Shepard grins. She can work with a little sarcasm. “So what are your top three?”

“Top three what?” He’s looking at her more fully now.

“Top three rude-ass questions humans ask you.”

His mandibles twitch. She wasn’t expecting it but she doesn’t flinch, and when he speaks his translator-voice sounds a touch warmer. “So you can avoid repeating the mistakes of your people?”

“Hell no. I need to know what my competition is.”

Nihlus makes a sound that Shepard is going to classify as amused, in the face of insufficient evidence. “Believe it or not, not many humans are that eager to walk up to me and ask me rude questions.”

“Come on, there’s gotta be something.” This talking with a translator thing is getting a little easier as they go along. She can kind of redirect her focus on the input in her ear rather than the one in front of her.

“Hmmm, well,” he says musingly. “I’ve had a human ask me how turians have sex, with all the plates in the way.”

Shepard blinks, certain for a moment that she misheard. “Well. That’s… pretty bold.”

“In his defense, it ended up being something of a relevant question to ask.”

“ _Relevant?_ ”

Nihlus gives her a Look. She’s not… she can’t really tell what the look means, but it is definitely A Look and he holds it for a moment before continuing. “That was something of an outlier. Mostly, I just get invasive questions about my eating and grooming habits.”

“Pfft. Boring.”

“Oh yeah? Think you can do better?”

“Hmmmm….” Shepard tips her head to the side and taps her chin thoughtfully. “How big’s your penis?”

Nihlus shakes his head but that… that’s definitely a laugh. Turian laughs, as it turns out, are lovely. “So obvious, Shepard, I’m disappointed. That’s nowhere near as bad as being asked whether I have a cock or a cloaca.”

Shepard chokes, and spills out into helpless giggles before she can help herself. “Oh my god, are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck, that’s awful. What kind of person would even ask something like that?”

“Probably the same kind of person who would ask me how big my dick is.”

Shepard chuckles. “Touche.” And then, because this is already the last place she expected this conversation to go, what with turians being known for being unbending and proper to a fault, she asks “What about color?”

“What about it?”

“Well, you won't tell me how big it is. Is it blue? I’ve always wondered.”

“You’ve always wondered what color a turian penis is.”

“Hey, my life hasn’t been all wolfpack frontier strike forces and gunning down slavers. Sometimes I have to deal with this bullshit.” She waves a hand around, indicating both the station itself and the ludicrous injustice of being locked in comm sec with nothing to do, waiting for the brass to pull their fingers out so she can take their brand new toy out for a test drive when really she should be out there with her team doing something useful. “When you have nothing to do but think, sometimes your mind goes weird places.”

“Clearly.” He’s looking at her straight in the eye, and Shepard forces herself to look back even if that piercing gaze makes her uncomfortable. It’s like having a staring contest with a bird of prey. His mandibles are doing… something, and the plates on his face shift a little, but not into anything that much resembles a human expression. “… it is, more or less.”

Shepard can’t help the little fist pump “I knew it.”

“This must be a proud moment for you.”

“You have no idea. We had like, a three hour debate one time on the _Trafalgar_. I can’t wait to get out from under this damn communication ban and rub their noses in it.

“Charming.”

Shepard laughs. “I must be feeding into every bad stereotype about humanity there is right now.”

“That assumes you’re normal enough to qualify as stereotypical.”

Shepard punches him in the shoulder, lightly, like he’s one of her crewmates. She doesn’t even think about it, and she’s mortified when she realizes what she’s done, but that musical, resonant turian laugh fills the air again, so probably she managed to avoide breaching some bit of alien etiquette.

They kind of go quiet after that, but it’s more or less comfortable. Nihlus stands as rigid as every turian stereotype, with his armor and his holstered sidearm, while Shepard is slumped casually on a windowsill, one hip jutted out dressed only in her N7 sweats. She wonders what kind of picture they make, what anyone would see if they were to walk through the hall this early in the cycle.

On the other side of the window, the Normandy sits peacefully in her dock, encased safely within the station and tucked away from the prying eyes of anyone except her future crew and the ones who built her. And of course, one council Spectre.

“She sure is pretty,” Shepard sighs, resigned. “You can tell already she’s gonna be something special, can’t you?”

“It’s a ship,” Nihlus retorts. “You fly it through space and it goes through mass relays. This one can avoid detection while it slowly cooks its crew alive. What’s so special about that?”

“Ah, a cynic,” Shepard grins. Maybe she’s not the only one less than pleased with this “prestigious” assignment.

“A realist. The council is concerned about the ongoing tensions between the Alliance and the Hierarchy, and in order to keep those tensions from boiling back up they gave them a little group project. That’s fine, but this is a hell of a lot of fuss for what amounts to a fancy frigate.”

He could have snatched those words right out of her own mouth, especially a week ago when she first docked into this floating chunk of metal and had to stew for _five hours_ on the shuttle when the fancy new security software corrupted her personnel file. She opens her mouth to agree with him in the strongest terms (the damn thing apparently had to be reconstructed from _scratch_ , what the hell was wrong with the software they already had anyway), but something about the sight of the Normandy right in front of her makes her pause, and shake her head.

“Nah, this one’s special,” she says, certain as the words come out of her mouth.

“What makes you say that?”

Shepard shrugs, pushing away from the window. It’s past time she went back to her run. “I dunno. I can just feel it.”

*

“Commander this is highly irregular. Are you sure — ”

“Relax, LT. If the brass aren’t worried about the consequences of locking a bunch of bored soldiers in one tiny wing of a space station without access to anything so much as extranet porn, then I’m not worried about committing a few irregularities keeping everyone entertained.” Including herself.

“There’s plenty of exercise equipment — ”

“Lifting weights is boring. So is running in circles through the same stretch of corridor day in and day out like some kinda hamster on a wheel. Ask me how I know.”

“Yeah okay, fine, we’re bored as hell. That sucks but it’s our ass if one of them gets hurt.”

“They’re not gonna get hurt. And if they do,” Shepard raises her voice over Lt. Alenko’s continued objections, “then I’ll take responsibility. I’ll tell them I bullied you into it — ”

“You are bullying me into it,” he says wryly.

“Well there you go. Our cover story just so happens to be the truth, see how convenient? Now watch the mats.” She pats him on the shoulder. It’s better that he figures out now what he’s in for as her Lieutenant; there’s a reason they stuck her in a flotilla of aging ships as far from civilization as they could get her. A lot of reasons. And it’s sure as fuck not her fault if they forgot every one of them and dragged her kicking and screaming back to Arcturus. They want her so badly they can deal with her, and if she’s lucky they’ll cotton on to their fuckup and kick her right back out to the wolfpack.

_And then I’ll ride out of here on a unicorn to go commune with the space whales._

They’re in the “gym”. Quotation marks included because what they’re actually in is a conference room with a few mats and weights scattered around. No treadmills, apparently because of the perfectly good solid metal corridor right outside, and the conference table is still in the fucking room, folded up and leaning against a wall that could have included mirrors if the powers that be were actually all that concerned about preventing injury.

“They” means Shepard, Alenko, and a hodgepodge of the Normandy’s current engineers and future crew. All human, of course. For a project that is supposedly about fostering collaboration between the Hierarchy and the Alliance, the only turian Shepard has actually seen involved with the ship at all is Nihlus, and he obviously didn’t help build it.

They’re all locked in the same cage of confidentiality, they all have hand-to-hand combat training, and they’re all bored to tears. Technically, yes, sparring is against regulations — Alenko’s protests aren’t just because he’s an uptight stick in the mud. Although he’s here, so that maybe says something about his ultimate commitment to the rules. But its not going to be a free-for-all, they have rules and trained people watching closely, and Shepard is fully prepared to defend her actions with a rant about maintaining the readiness of a crew allowed to rot until the people upstairs can manage to tie their shoes and pick out which brand of shampoo they’re going to stock the ship with.

“Is he fussing again?” Dr. Karin Chakwas saunters around the edges of the mats, watching Jenkins get his ass more or less handed to him by a solidly built engineer who had consulted on the weapons systems.

“I’m not fussing, I’m— ”

“Yes.” Shepard interrupts with a grin.

“Well, don’t. Leave the worrying to the Commander and the medic. It’s our job.”

“Yes but you’re not,” Alenko says desperately, but he’s smiling a little.

“I know this may come as a shock to you, Lieutenant, but that’s not actually an invitation to do all the worrying yourself.”

Alenko opens his mouth to protest, and makes the conscious choice to stop banging his head against a wall. Smart man. “Terribly shocked, Doctor. I might need you to go fetch me the smelling salts.”

Dr. Chakwas laughs and Shepard grins widely and pats him on the back. “That’s the spirit, Lieutenant.” He tries to look sternly at her but he can’t hide that little twitch of a grin. “See that? Look at us bonding as we laugh in the face of regulations, this was an excellent idea. OI! Jenkins!” Alenko winces as she inadvertently shouts in his ear. “I can actually have a conversation and watch what’s in front of my face at the same time! Cheat on my mats again and you can go the next round with me. You can see how far those tricks get you against a biotic, how’s that sound?”

Jenkins goes a little pale and gives her a sheepish nod. The engineer he’s facing — Shepard can’t quite remember her name, M-something — takes the opportunity to scoop Jenkins into an arm bar, and that’s all she wrote.

The room erupts into cheers and laughter but Jenkins takes it good naturedly, shaking his opponent’s hand and complementing her genuinely on the take-down. The humility is to his credit and somewhat surprising; he’s young and gung-ho in a way that worries her. She hopes an easy couple of assignments will give him room to mature rather than whet his appetite for action. She’ll have to keep an eye on him; if he gets the bit between his teeth it might get him killed.

Shepard turns to Alenko and quirks a brow at him. “How bout we go a few rounds, Lieutenant? biotic versus biotic, give these kids a show.

Predictably, he shakes his head, but he looks at her oddly and his eyes flick around the crowded room. “Not really looking to be laid up the rest of the day with a migraine.”

“That bad?”

“Sometimes.”

“Every time you use them?”

Alenko shrugs. “Intense use, yeah. Like, a quick demonstration or a couple minutes of fine work aren’t usually a problem. And out in the field my armor is designed to help regulate a little, so I can use them longer without needing to lay down in the dark for a week, But a few rounds on the mats with another biotic? Might as well just stick a scalpel in my ear now and save us all some time.”

“Yeah, please don’t do that.”

Alenko chuckles. “Aye aye, commander.”

“Hey commander!” Jenkins pipes up at her elbow. Two more people are squaring off at the mats, spectators loudly placing bets and egging on their friends.

“Yeah, Jenkins?” He looks like an eager puppy. Shepard barely manages to suppress the urge to scritch his ears and ask him who’s a good boy.

“Do you think you can uhm, do a demonstration for us at some point today?” Shepard gives Alenko a look like _see?_ and he rolls his eyes. “Like, show us some stuff we don’t learn in basic?”

“Anything in particular in mind?”

“Well, you’ve spent a lot of time fighting bandits in the Skyllian Verge, right? And mercs? I- a couple of us were wondering how you’d take down a turian hand-to-hand?”

Aand just like that the urge to pet the puppy is gone. Now she wants a rolled up newspaper to thwap him on the nose with. She sees Alenko stiffen and open his mouth out the corner of her eye, but she cuts him off.

“I don’t.” Shepard says, clipped. “That’s what guns are for: shooting people who shoot me first.”

Jenkins either ignores or does not pick up on the warning in her tone and barrels on. “But what if the gun overheats or gets damaged or something! You’re an N7, you must know something cool!”

Something cool. Christ, what are they teaching kids at the Alliance these days. Shepard resists the urge to pinch her eyes shut. “Jenkins,” she says calmly. “Is there a particular reason you’re asking me to show you ‘something cool’ about taking down turians?”

Jenkins gaze flicks to the side. “Uh-uuhm. Well, you know. I just thought it would be, um, interesting?”

“Interesting.”

“Y-yeah. Or like, useful. With the, you know.”

“I don’t think I do know. We’re in a security lockdown made up of almost entirely humans for a ship crewed by humans, preparing to take her on her maiden voyage to a human colony in human occupied space. Statistically, knowing how to take down humans is going to be more useful to you in the immediate future, and we’ve all seen how you could use some pointers on that haven’t we.”

“Commander…” Alenko says uneasily. Jenkins flushes beat red, but Shepard is not done.

“I’m just interested to know why you’re so interested in turians, Jenkins. Why not ask me about asari, or salarians. Or Batarians, who happen to _not_ be our allies and who I _have_ spent most of my time in the Verge fighting?”

The match on the mats stalls out as their discussion draws a little audience of their own, eyes darting from Jenkins to herself and back. Aliens are a sticky topic among most soldiers; anyone older than Shepard herself remembers a time when humanity thought itself completely alone in the universe and no one, including Shepard herself, really knows how to deal with that. But feeling weird about something doesn’t give her leave to be a dick about it, and for better or for worse she needs to set some kind of an example. Jenkins knew exactly what he was asking for and that kind of shit cannot and will not fly under her command.

Jenkins begins to stammer something vaguely apologetic when his eyes dart over her shoulder and he goes deathly pale. Shepard knows who it is before the newcomer even opens his mouth.

“Quite the crowd in here today.”

Shepard turns to give Nihlus her very best no-sir-my-subordinates-were-absolutely-not-asking-me-for-tips-on-killing-or-incapacitating-your-species-specifically look and her brain grinds to a halt. Wow. Turian workout clothes are a thing. That’s… well, it makes sense now that she thinks about it but she hadn’t. Before. And now she is! And that’s. Cool.

“Are you wearing a tank top?” Smooth, Shepard. A credit to humanity.

Nihlus’s mandibles twitch and he tips his head up and to one side. Shepard can just _feel_ the mockery and works to keep the blush from her face. “Yes. And I see you are too.”

Shepard clears her throat. “Right, well, yeah. That’s… true.” She rubs at the back of of her head and valiantly rallies the shattered remains of her dignity. Shepard has only really seen a turian out of armor a handful of times, and even then they were in these all-matching head to toe numbers, complete with gloves and sometimes a hooded cowl. She’s never seen a turian show so much — is skin the right word here? Close enough, right? And maybe that’s on purpose, because they look even more monstrous uncovered. Or, that’s probably kind of offensive, but he still is undeniably more alien looking out of armor. The limbs are spindly and stretched out in odd proportions, the three fingered hands are frankly unnerving, and the slabs of plating over leathery skin look downright ridiculous with that white tank top stretched on top. Shepard’s not the only one staring.

He really does look like a monster out of an old vid. Yet the clothes he’s wearing are so weirdly normal, only cut to fit the odd dimensions of his body; the neckline is more like a chestline to accommodate his crest, and the stretchy material of his pants sling casually around his protruding hip bones and cut off just before the long jut of his spurs.

“Here to use the gym?” She asks and nearly slaps herself in the face because obviously.

“Such as it is,” he says, startling a laugh out of Shepard. The distaste in his tone is a near-perfect match to her earlier thoughts.

“It’s shit, isn’t it? We’re having a couple friendly sparring matches because everyone is bored to tears and my other plan was to start a riot to break up the monotony.”

“Hmm. I didn’t think the Alliance approved of that sort of thing.”

Shepard narrows her eyes. “Riots? It doesn’t, generally. Hence, the sparring.”

Nihlus’s mandibles flicker. “I meant the sparring, actually.”

Of course he did. Turians are big sticklers for protocol, she knows, and she can’t see their brass looking any more kindly on fights between their guys than the alliance does even if they are just friendly supervised matches. Shepard pops one hip out and crosses her arms in an aggressively casual stance. “Guess I’m not a big fan of rules.”

That flicker again, bigger this time. “I see. Mind if I join in?”

Shepard realizes just now how quiet the room has gone. Everyone has stopped what they’re doing to stare at the unfolding conversation. Some of them likely have more exposure to other alien races than she does, but not a whole lot more, and a lot of people’s expressions are ranging from tense to downright hostile. On the one hand, she knows her duty here; this whole project is about playing nice with the turians, and kicking the only one around off of the jungle gym is going to set a bad precedent. She’ll be the first to admit her general ignorance about aliens, but for a lot of people it goes a lot deeper than that. The kind of shit that they could maybe let slide in the wolfpack can’t fly here, and frankly she doesn’t want it to.

On the other hand, it wouldn’t look much better to let the turian Spectre come in to their semisecret little fight club and start whaling on all her people. A problem for which there is fortunately a solution, one that makes anticipation prickle across her skin.

“Sure,” Shepard says, tipping her head back to look him in the eye. “As long as you pick on someone your own size, Mr. Council Spectre.”

A fission of excitement ruffles though the gathered crowd. “Is that a challenge?” Nihlus’s voice as fed in her ear by her translator is distinctly amused.

“Only if you’re not too scared to accept it,” Shepard says, examining her nails just to lay it on even thicker. Although, she realizes belatedly as she notices a few chips in her fresh polish, there’s a good likelihood he doesn’t recognize those kind of body language cues.

“Oh, I accept. You can even give your men that biotic demonstration you were so keen on.”

“Oh, shit,” one of the gathered group murmurs, and there’s a muffled thump as someone presumably smacks him up the back of the head. Shepard blinks and wrestles mightily against the slow warming of her face. So Nihlus was there for that. Which meant he heard Jenkins’ unsubtle line of questioning. Great. Wonderful. She supposes she should at least be grateful he let her know he’d been eavesdropping; it’s almost courteous of him if you look at it sideways.

“Shepard this is a bad idea,” Alenko whispers urgently as Nihlus stalks to the side to wrap his hands. The effect looks very strange with only three fingers, but she supposes he still has joints that need support.

“Your lack of confidence wounds me, Lieutenant,” she says dryly, stretching out her shoulder, though privately she kind of sees his point. They’ve got a big audience for this particular spectacle, and for a lot of them it’s gonna be personal. The First Contact War may have been thirty years ago but no one wants to see one of their own beaten in their own house by a turian. Feels too much like history repeating itself.

And Shepard is an N7, the best of the best the human military has to offer regardless of how badly the political types preferred to keep her out of the way. If even she can’t beat a Spectre, what hope do they have? It’s a hell of a lot to put on one “friendly” sparring match, but she hasn’t forgotten how political everything gets back in civilization.

Chakwas looks at her, lips tight and pinched, and sighs. “Nothing I say is going to talk you out of this, is it?”

Shepard gives her her best, sunniest smile. “Nope.”

“Soldiers. Not an ounce of sense in the lot of you. Please try to avoid serious injury; I’d really like to avoid the paperwork.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Shepard takes her place on her side of the mat, bouncing a bit on her toes to bleed off the excess energy. When Nihlus takes his place she sizes him up. And up. And up.

Fuck, he’s tall.

Shepard herself is a little tall for a woman, but that still gives the turian more than a foot on her. Yeah she’s faced larger opponents before, but not this much larger. Not to mention his natural armor. That kind of thing may not make a shit of difference to her shotgun, but barehanded and unarmored in front of a bunch of her subordinates, including a few she’ll be leading on ground missions? Yeah. It’s a factor.

“They tell me the N7 are the most elite fighters humanity has to offer.”

She’s so distracted by her nerves that it takes a minute to parse the translated sentence over the rumble of his voice and the murmurs of the gathered crowd placing bets and sharing speculations.

“Yep,” she says with a pop.

“I’ve never fought one before,” he says. “Guess we’ll find out if that’s worth anything, huh?”

Shepard bares her teeth. “Oh it is so on.”

Shepard sees Chakwas raise her arm out the corner of her eye, but keeps Nihlus right in her sights as he drops into a stance. “Begin!”

Shepard springs into motion before the second syllable leaves her mouth, dipping low to bring her arms up and _push_ Nihlus’ stomach with a little shock of blue energy. Instead of staggering he merely steps one foot back, snatching her wrists to pull her tumbling across the mat. She rolls to her feet and launches herself back at him, pulling a barrier right up over the surface of her skin, setting the world wavy and blue.

“Good reflexes,” he says as he sidesteps and evades her fresh attack, easy as breathing. She catches his elbow on her cheek as she overshoots her target, only barely managing to dodge enough to avoid a broken nose. He’s a lot faster than he looks; that crest makes him seem so clunky and awkward, but he’s sleek and easy on his feet.

Before she can snap back something sarcastic, he moves on the offensive, raining down a rapid series of blows she has to rely on her barrier to block, driving her back and putting her on the defensive. The peanut gallery surrounding them yells out encouragement and suggestions, but she’s too focused on her opponent to pay them any mind. She wasn’t expecting so much speed, and he moves so differently than what she’s used to in a friendly match like this. A different body, a different fighting style, and he’s almost certainly gone toe-to-toe with alliance trained humans before, even if not N7s.

He catches her in the chin with a sharp blow, snapping her head back and sending her staggering, but as he spins around for a kick she _pushes_.

It’s not much, not without her amps and her armor, but it’s enough to stagger him and give her the room to strike, flat palmed, at the juncture between his shoulder and chest, and again at the space that would be right below the ribcage on a human. Places where the plates are thin or nonexistent, to allow flexibility. Direct hits on plates are going to be worse than useless; nothing short of cracking or puncturing force is even going to startle a turian, and she could easily break her hand if she misses her mark.

Nihlus, however, does not need to aim so carefully. Once more she finds herself scrambling to protect her vulnerable points as a hot knot of tension grows at the back of her skull and the strength of her barrier wavers. There are spots she could go for, like his fringe or the spurs at the back of his legs, but she’s pretty sure seriously injuring or crippling a Spectre would be a bad career move. Though when she finds herself stumbling to her knees and blocking a vicious slash at the side of her neck she’s suddenly extremely tempted.

“Cheap trick!” She growls, the outraged voices of a dozen or so enraged marines rising in her ears. With a shouted grunt of effort she sends him _up_ into the air and drops him to the ground in a sprawl of metallic limbs.

“I knew you could handle it,” he says. His translator voice sounds a little winded, though Shepard can’t recognize it in his actual speech. Even so, he recovers faster than she can climb back onto her feet. She feels like a newborn foal, all spindly limbs and bewilderment. Her barrier is hardly a flicker of blue across her eyesight, and when she tries to bolster it she gets a spike of pain through her skull for her trouble. Fuck.

“Fuck,” she says. She lets her barrier drop. The gathered crowd is hushed, and also bigger than she remembers it being when they first started. She eyes Nihlus warily as she takes in great gasps of air, ignoring the threatening headache and the trickles of sweat sliding down her spine and the tremble in her limbs. Nihlus looks for all the world like he’s in line waiting for a shuttle, the absolute fucker.

“Had enough?”

Shepard bares her teeth, coiled in a ready stance. “You wish.”

She stumbles to the side as he comes at her again, dodging a punch and blocking a knee aimed at her gut that jars her joints painfully without the cushion of her biotics. She thinks she has a better feel for how he moves now but it might be too little too late. Sweat stings her eyes. Bruises bloom where she wasn’t quick enough to dodge, or simply couldn’t spare the energy. The tension at the back of her skull starts to ease but slowly, so slowly. She slips out of Nilus’s grip, just barely, as he tries to grapple her. His breath ruffles through her hair as she slides past him, getting a few hits in, and he growls as he tries to break through her defenses. He’s like a machine, she can see no sign of him tiring. What the hell did she get herself into?

 _You are a goddamn Systems Alliance N7 Marine_ , she snarls to herself. _Don’t you fucking_ dare _let some Council spook get the best of you in front of all your people._

She gives her biotics an experimental tug and they respond, a little sluggish but there. She holds her ground, barely, managing to catch a somewhat wild swing from Nihlus — maybe he is tiring — to yank him down into a vicious headbutt. It hurts like a bitch but it’s still enough to rattle his brains a bit, let her gain a bit of ground before he comes at her again, twice as fierce but just as sloppy.

Shepard hums a few bars of a song in her head. An old song, a Mindoir song. One that her mother liked to hum as she fixed an engine or hauled feed or tacked up a horse. A song that she knows intimately, backwards and forwards, that she sung when she trained until she could focus and get the timing right even if she were half conscious with exhaustion and bleeding. Which is lucky because

Nihlus makes a mistake. It’s not the first one but it comes right when she reaches the end of the chorus and she grabs his arm in both hands, pivots her hip, and hauls him over. The thing about turians is that they’re top heavy, and he goes down on his back like a sack of potatoes. With a burst of biotics at her feet she flips over his head, twists, and lands right across his hips, one hand shoved at the v of his crest in lieu of a choke hold, the other pulled back and aimed at his head, glowing with the last of her biotic power.

Silence, except for their heaving gasps for air. Nihlus looks distinctly dazed, eyes unfocused and mandibles slack on the side of his face. She can see the sharp points of his teeth and his eyes are very, very green. Piercing, sharp as a knife, and though Shepard’s the one who’s got him flat on his back on a mat it’s she who feels pinned.

Nihlus puts one odd, three fingered hand over hers and taps gently, twice. Shepard nearly collapses with relief, the blue flickering out at once as her hand falls to brace herself off the floor. Everyone in the room loses their fucking mind, shouting encouragements and congratulations at her and mockery at him, but she’s too dizzy and wrung out to really parse any of it.

 _I should really get off him about ten seconds ago_ , she thinks, but she can’t resist smirking down at him, victory quickly putting energy back into her muscles. “Gotcha.”

Nihlus reaches up to touch her face. Shepard’s eyes go wide, too startled to even move away as his thumb strokes the top of her lip.

“Your nose is bleeding.”

Shepard blinks at him. Then her brain puts meaning into the words and she jerks up. “Shit,” she says, tipping her head back and pinching her nose. The crowd, distracted by their vicarious success, doesn’t immediately notice what’s happening. It’s just when she realizes that she’s still straddling the turian Spectre on the floor of a makeshift gym that the door slams open and a tight voice cuts through the celebrating soldiers.

“Would anyone like to explain to me what the hell is going on here?”

*

“Sir, it was a couple of friendly sparring matches,” Shepard says about twenty minutes in to being chewed a new asshole. Her nose has stopped bleeding, but she can still feel the crust of dried blood on her upper lip and forehead, and a collection of aches and bruises have made themselves known in the worst way.

“Friendly?” Splutters captain Dillard. “ _Friendly_? You risk the safety of half the Normandy engineering team with some hairbrained fightclub jackassery and that’s how you justify it to me? It was friendly? With your face still bloody from whatever you got up to with that turian?”

“Whatever I got up to?” Shepard smirks, her eyes narrowed. “It’s called winning. Sir.”

Dillard looks like he would dearly like to go a few rounds on the mats with her himself. Which fair enough, even Laurence would have thrown her in the brig to cool her heels for a few hours for pulling that kind of tone. But she’s achy and exhausted and grumpy at this guy for killing her victory buzz. She beat a Spectre. Hand to hand. With _witnesses_. He at least could have let her get a damn shower before dragging her into his office.

“Tread carefully, commander,” Dillard says tightly. “It’s not too late to take you off this assignment.”

 _Please fucking do_ , Shepard wants to say. But realistically all that’s likely to do is get her kicked down to the Charon Relay to pull sentry duty for the rest of her life, Star of Terra be damned. A shame, because she doesn’t want to be here any more than he wants to babysit the Alliance’s problem child, and there’s not a damn thing either of them can do about it. She’d almost feel a little empathy for him if he wasn’t insisting on being such a jackass about the whole thing.

“Sorry, sir,” she says.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you how delicate this operation is. The Hierarchy is riding us hard enough as it is over our progress and the changes we’ve made. The last thing we need is for you to give them a reason to come down harder on us for fighting one of their representatives.”

“He’s a Spectre,” Shepard points out, because she at least knows that that makes a difference. “He’s here for the Council, not the Hierarchy. And we weren’t — ”

“Even worse!” Dillard shouts over her. “The Council’s concern with the ongoing tensions between us and the fucking dinosaurs are the whole reason we’re in this mess to begin with. Do you know how much damage you might have done if you had accidentally injured Kryik? Don’t give me that look, Shepard, you know full well how dangerous “friendly” sparring matches can be, and there’s nothing friendly about those… biotic _powers_ of yours.”

He says “biotic powers” the way someone might say “poisonous snakes” or “live grenades”. Shepard grits her teeth. “Sir, with all do respect — ”

“That would be a damn first. I am not finished, Commander! I don’t care what kind of training or fancy doodads you have drilled into your brain, you’re a bomb waiting to go off. All of you are. It makes the Hierarchy nervous, it makes me nervous, and it’s about the only thing me and the birds agree on. It’s creepy and unnatural, to be perfectly frank, and you shouldn’t have been going off like a firework in front of half the damn crew, let alone actually using them on a turian agent of the Council.”

“I can take my creepy and unnatural self right back home any time, Captain,” Shepard snaps.

“Commander, if it were up to me I’d bump you down to private and kick you straight to Charon,” Dillard says, like he’d read her mind. “But Admiral Hackett requested you specifically for this assignment, so unless you really make a mess of things I’m stuck with you. But please, feel free to dig yourself deeper.”

He looks at her, daring her to give him one excuse, but this one time Shepard keeps her mouth firmly shut.

“No more fights in the gym commander,” he says after a moment, sounding like he’d like to say a lot more. “Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

*

The next night finds finds Shepard back at the makeshift gym, this time without a crowd and with all of the equipment put back in place. The punching bag is kinda shit, freestanding and given to wobble if she hits it with any kind of real force, but it’s what she’s got right now so she’s gonna have to make due. Twelve hours laid flat out with a biotic headache hasn’t done any favors for her mood, and she’s still fuming over that meeting with Dillard.

She forgets, sometimes, how nervous the biotics tend to make people. She tries not to use them in the colonies of course, but it’s supposed to be different with civilians. Sure, some of them are still stuck mentally on Shanxi during first contact, but the Alliance is supposed to be better than that, more informed. Her old crew never blinked an eye when she used her abilities.

A sharp wave of homesickness rises up Shepard’s throat, and she rests her forehead on the punching bag to ride it out. Why the fuck did Hackett bring her here, anyway? She doesn’t think she did anything to piss him off. Lately, at least. She hasn’t even seen the man in… shit, probably not since she graduated ICT. They haven’t really talked since then either; he’s a busy guy and she spends most of her time far out of range of easy extranet access. Maybe she should have made more of an effort, since its thanks to him she even got to the Villa in the first place, but he’s not her father and they both have shit to do. She’s not going to get all clingy.

With an aggravated sigh she steps back and throws a punch at the bag. And then she throws another, wishing she could add a little juice behind it because she really needs to blow off some steam. It’s so frustrating that she has to settle for these unsatisfying little baby hits when she really just wants to go to town. She tries a right hook with just a touch more muscle behind it and of course the damn thing wobbles on her. With a frustrated growl she spins around and kicks the bag into the wall in a flare of blue. “Fucking piece of shit,” she snarls.

“Sorry if I’m interrupting.”

Shepard very determinedly does _not_ jump out of her skin and walks calmly over to haul the the bag back upright. Honestly, turians have no business being so stealthy. He’s out of his armor again today, though he’s not in that minimalist workout outfit. “Not at all,” she says. “The equipment’s all crap though, and none of it’s designed for turians.” Shepard stops and tips her head to the side. What does turian gym equipment even look like, anyway?

“Actually, I’m here for you,” he says, stepping forward. “Your superior give you much trouble? You were nowhere to be found after he came in yesterday.”

Shepard grimaces. “I _might_ have overextended myself yesterday. A little bit.”

“I’d wondered. You seem to have recovered quickly though.”

She shrugs one shoulder, picking idly at her wraps. “Perks of being an L3. I was older when I got my implants, so I don’t have the fine control L2s my age like Lieutenant Alenko do, but if I strain myself I can pop a few mild painkillers and have a nap and be okay in a couple hours. Alenko tells me he’s laid up for days, sometimes.”

“Humanity has made remarkable improvements in such a short amount of time. I understand that there have only been biotic-capable humans for a handful of decades.”

“Yeah, Alenko and I are first generation.” Shepard pulls a face and turns back to whale on the punching bag. “Lucky us.”

“Something wrong with being the first?”

Shepard keeps her focus right in front of her and shakes her head. “You know how it is; first one’s the one you make all the mistakes on. A lot of L2s got really shafted in that first wave of research - cognitive impairment, long term disability. Mental instability. They’re not being taken care of like they should, and there have been some… incidents. Spooked a lot of people.”

“’People’ like your captain?”

Shepard clicks her tongue and gives him a finger gun. “Got it in one. Dillard’s a moron, and if he’s seen a real assignment since Shanxi I’ll eat my helmet.”

“I didn’t know human jaw strength was so impressive.”

“It’s not. I’m that confident it won’t come to that.” Shepard misjudges the power behind a hit and the bag wobbles again. “Fucking. Piece of shit.”

“Confidence is good,” Nihlus says idly. “How long are you going to keep this up?”

“Until I stop imagining Dillard’s smug face with every hit.”

“Ah. A while then.”

“Yep,” Shepard says with a pop.

“And this is normally how you deal with conflict.”

The bag very nearly tips over and Shepard catches it, turning her head to look at Nihlus out the corner of her eye. Nothing in his translator-voice or his stance seem to indicate judgment, but it’s not like she’d know.

“Normally I’m not trapped on a space station without my crew or any communications or a single fucking useful thing to do.” She snaps, the bile of forced inactivity and a week and change spent agonizing with worry over her team bubbling up before she can bite it back. She tries to remind herself, again, that they’re good people who can handle their shit just fine without her, but that doesn’t make her feel any less like she’s abandoned them. “I don’t have a whole lot of options if I need to blow off steam.”

“I can think of a few things that might help.”

Shepard laughs. “Much as I enjoyed the last round, big guy, it’s not worth my skin if Dillard catches us sparring again.” She sighs loudly, rubbing at her forehead. “Man, I’d kill for a gun range right about now. Or hey, while I’m dreaming, and open field with some soda bottles.”

Nihlus crosses his arms and leans against the back against the wall in front of her. It’s a gesture that Shepard finds oddly human; just a guy settling in for a chat. At least, she hopes that’s what it is and she’s not misreading the warning signs for an impending turian rampage. “That’s a pretty unusual dream.”

“I guess it’s pretty specific,” she says with a shrug. “My dad taught me how to shoot with these old water bottles he’d refilled and carbonated, so they’d explode when they were shot. It was fun to watch when I was a kid, the water gushing out all over the place whenever I’d hit the target.”

It’s one of her happiest memories from. Before. There are a lot of happy memories to choose from, really. Logically, she knows she had to have been unhappy sometimes; her grabbing her dad’s shotgun and a backpack full of fizzy water to blow off steam in a back field had been a somewhat regular occurrence. She just can’t remember any of the whys anymore.

She remembers being so excited to teach Fen how to shoot, once he’d been old enough.

“Did you always want to be a soldier, then?” Nihlus says, jerking her back into the here and now. Shepard gives herself a little mental shake and forces herself back into the present.

“Hardly,” she snorts. “Colony kids basically all learn how to shoot just as soon as they can be trusted not to blow their own faces off. A lot of those planets seem to have big native predators, and even if they don’t they all butt right up against the terminus systems.” Her fists clench and she has to work to unstick her breath from her throat. “Didn’t help Mindoir, but the Alliance has gotten better at dealing with that sort of thing since then. At least I like to think so.”

Memories flash in the back of her head — the screaming of people and animals, the smell of fire lodged in her nose, Fen —

Nope. No. No, she is not doing this now. She takes a deep breath and wishes that the punching bag wasn’t such a worthless freestanding sack of shit. Fuck.

“Interesting,” Nihlus says neutrally, seeming for all the world like he hasn’t even noticed her little mini freakout. Probably he’s just not the least bit interested in her little insights into human colony culture.

“You can always leave if I’m boring you,” she says waspishly, knowing she’s not being fair but too keyed up and oversensitive to stop herself..

“You don’t have to worry about boring me,” Nihlus says. He pushes off the wall and steps closer to her. “You seem tense.”

Shepard snorts. “You think?”

“I’m sorry if I brought up bad memories.”

“Not bad,” Shepard says quietly. “Good. It’s just. Everything that came after.”

Nihlus hums and puts a hand on her shoulder. A little shudder rocks through her body, but she lets it stay there. “I know a little of what that’s like.”

“Yeah,” Shepard says, and then scoffs, sick of herself. “Look at me, bringing the room down. And here I came here to avoid thinking about shit I can’t control.”

“You should let me distract you,” Nihlus says, squeezing a little. Shepard glares up at him and crosses her arms, refusing to be intimidated.

“I told you, Dillard — ”

“I’m not talking about sparring,” he says, his voice sounding deep and rather rumbley through the translator. He brings his other hand up to her other shoulder, the intensity of his stare sending a prickly little shiver across Shepard’s skin. Oh. _Oh._ Oh no way. She’s, Shepard’s definitely got to be reading this wrong.

“What, uh,” Shepard swallows and thinks about stepping out from under his grasp. She doesn’t. “What are you talking about then.”

With slow deliberation Nihlus runs a hand down her bare arm, and then curls a hand around her hip.

“What the fuck?” Shepard murmurs, her air getting stuck in her throat

“It’s just an offer,” Nihlus says, though she’d really prefer if he specified what exactly is on offer here, because she does not feel comfortable assuming. His voice in her ear is low and throaty but there’s an interesting vibrating quality to his real voice, a sort of low rumble that stretches between words like taffy that the translator doesn’t seem to pick up. “Obviously, you don’t have to take me up on it.”

His thumb starts stroking softly back and forth and he shifts to step just the littlest bit more into her space. Shepard’s brain stutters and grinds trying to make sense of what’s happening here. They’re standing so close, and he is. Very tall. Every ounce of his attention is zeroed right on her and that stroking is very distracting. She supposes that she should be grateful he isn’t wearing the gym gear, though whether that’s because it would be a temptation or a deterrent is anyone’s guess at this point. Probably it wouldn’t have made a difference either way; turians in her experience are so rarely in public when they’re not covered from head to toe that the picture of him with so much skin exposed has sort of burned itself into her brain

Now he’s wearing normal clothes, the turian version at least, so the effect is somewhat muted. Honestly though, he still looks like a monster. Claws that could tear easily into her flesh, metallic plating that easily brushes off the majority of Shepard’s physical attacks, the sharp teeth exposed along the sides of his mouth. There’s nothing about him that doesn’t scream predator somewhere in her primal lizard brain. There’s really no looking past how alien he is, but Shepard… now that’s she’s looking, she can see herself finding that compelling if she were to tip her head and squint. There’s an interesting aesthetic to the shape of his limbs and the sharp angles and curves of his body. He’s not attractive in any way she can really connect to but he’s. Interesting. Magnetic.

Maybe even appealing?

“How would that even work,” she mutters to herself, not entirely realizing she’d said that out loud until Nihlus laughs. He brings down his other hand so he can hold both her hips, gripping them gently, but firmly. And it’s. A thing. His talons aren’t really _sharp_ , but she can feel the curve of them against her skin. Standing like this, it’s natural for Shepard to bring up her hands and settle them on his upper arms, and it sends a cold tingle of unease and excitement down her spine. She can’t bring herself to tip her head back and look him in those sharp green eyes though. Not when they’re this close.

“It’s mostly what you’re used to,” Nihlus assures her. “With a little added consideration for friction.”

Friction. Plates scraping against the insides of her thighs, her breasts. Claw marks all down her back. Christ. She’s always liked it a little on the rough side, but this is ridiculous. Absurd. She’s as familiar with dirty jokes and weird alien porn as the next marine, but to actually be considering this? It’s nuts.

“Have you done this before? With a human, I mean.” She’s kind of stalling for time while her brain runs in circles and makes alarmed shrieking noises, but it’s also a legitimate question. If she’s going to give into madness she’d like at least one of them to know what they’re doing. Her head feels a little swimmy and she wonders if she shouldn’t step back, give herself a little breathing room and some space to think, but she doesn’t really want to. Her heart feels like its going to leap out of her throat.

“I have,” Nihlus rumbles in her ear. “Several times. I’m pretty thoroughly familiar with the human body at this point.”

“The female one, at least,” Shepard jokes lamely.

“Not exclusively.” He chuckles at her surprised look. “Once you cross the line to another species, things like gender or biological sex seem largely irrelevant.”

“I… guess I can’t argue with that,” Shepard says, feeling more than a little off balance. She realizes that she doesn’t actually have any idea how other races view topics like sexuality or gender identity. Each species must have thousands or more years of cultural context and norms and prejudices and values, assuming they’re anything like humanity. She’s never thought about that. And while she knows what the general human reaction would be if she were to sneak off for a tumble with a turian spook, she has no idea if Nihlus would be facing the same kind of backlash. Of course, he’s a Spectre and Spectres operate by a different rulebook. Nothing short of treason against the Citadel Council is likely to slow him down much.

One of his hands slides from her hip to the small of her back and pulls her flush against him. Shepard squeaks. Observe one of the Alliance’s bravest and most highly trained soldiers, ladies and gentlemen. Unshakable in even the most hopeless combat situations, devolves into a giddy schoolgirl when propositioned by an alien.

In her defense he’s very warm, even through the thick fabric of his clothing. What that’s supposed to defend her against she’s not sure but the arm snaking around her waist does feel kind of nice. Shepard flushes and feels a flood of… something. Maybe nothing more than curiosity. Maybe it’s curiosity that has her touching him back, moving her hands from his arms to his chest and feeling the continuous rumbling there. He really is very warm.

“You don’t have to decide right now,” Nihlus murmurs, leaning down a little, telegraphing his movements and giving her plenty of time to react. Shepard lets her eyes slip closed and whoa is that a mistake, leaving her with nothing but toe-curling, tingling sensation as he nuzzles lightly at her cheek, her ear, the curve of her neck. The scent of him fills her nose, dusty and metallic; odd, but not unpleasant. Her whole body shivers. “And I wont be offended if the answer is no.”

Wow, she can feel his voice rumble in his chest, the base notes reverberating with surprising strength under her hands. He’s so close she feels like she can barely hear her translator over the musical, layered notes of his speech.

“It… it’s not no, necessarily,” Shepard says. “But I. This is insane. You know that right?”

Interestingly, Shepard feels his chest vibrate before she hears him speak. She wonders how much she’s missing by being unable to hear the full range of his voice. And then she promptly loses the brain power to wonder anything when he rakes a clawed hand through he hair and presses his nose against it, inhaling deeply.

“I have a cabin,” Nihlus says. “If you come by, we can figure things out from there. If you don’t, we can pretend this conversation never happened. No worries, no pressure. Sane enough for you?”

“Heh.” Shepard smiles, despite herself. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I can work with that.”

“Good.”

His translator voice sounds pleased with himself, and his chest gives off a lot more of those vibrations that she can’t hear. He sort of nips her along the curve of her neck, not with teeth but with the press of those hardened mouth plates. She shivers all over as he steps away, taking his warmth with him. “Good night, Shepard.”

He’s halfway across the room before she can unstick the words from her throat. “Goodnight, Nihlus.”

*

Shepard doesn’t go to Nihlus’s room, that night. Rather, she goes to her own bunk, a lavish privilege of her rank set into a wall of the officer’s quarters complete with a sliding privacy panel, _which she doesn’t have to share with anyone_. It’s the one significant perk of this assignment for someone who has spent the bulk of the last five years sleeping in semitransparent pods in shifts. Sure, she’d trade it in an instant to be back where she belongs, but since that’s not on offer she’ll take what she can get.

Nihlus, apparently, has an _entire room_ to himself. She wonders what netted him that little slice of paradise; Spectre status or humans simply not wanting to share living space with a turian. Both? It’s probably both.

 _I’d be willing to share a little living space with him_ , Shepard thinks. Then catches the thought, examining it. Would she really though? Curiosity is one thing, but actually having sex with an actual alien? Actually taking off her clothes, opening herself up to a stranger — in _every_ sense of the word — and being that vulnerable? She walks through it mentally, in as much detail as she can imagine; touching and being touched, pressing her skin against his rough plating, seeing those unsettling eyes up close, feeling him inside her.

Shepard’s heartbeat kicks up. Oh. Yeah, okay, there’s definitely an appeal there. Shepard slips a hand into her sweats with a little mental shrug. After all she _is_ thinking about having sex with the guy. Even this much, thinking about him like this, makes her feel squirmy and nervous. But in sort of a good way. Maybe. This is a big fucking line in the sand she’s thinking about crossing; most soldiers she knows talk about xenophilia like it’s in the same category as bestiality, which Shepard thinks is kind of unjust but she’s always sort of seen their point. The asari are somewhat of an exception but even then talking to much or too loudly about attraction to them can net a lot of sideways looks in a lot of spaces. To say nothing of humans who claim to actually be in relationships with them.

And even that would hardly bat a single eyelash on the most fervent Terra Firma activist in comparison to _this_. Nihlus is a _turian_ , the monsters of the First Contact War who for a good long while seemed to validate every human cultural anxiety surrounding hostile alien takeovers. The depth of the transgression should be a deterrent, but it burns under her skin. She can’t even really imagine how it would work; Nihlus said the mechanics were mostly the same but how could they be? He’s so much taller, covered in spikes and armor. Hell, his knees don’t even bend the same way. Right now, alone in her private bunk working herself as quietly as she can, the idea seems thrilling. But how will the idea hold up to reality? Would it hurt? How awkward would it be, because it _would_ be awkward. Sex with humans could be plenty awkward and uncomfortable, even with prior experience.

Which isn’t to say that prior experience wouldn’t help. Nihlus talked like he had done this sort of thing a fair amount, and he’d apparently liked it enough to risk chatting up an Alliance soldier on Arcturus station. Not the most xenophilia-friendly spot in the galaxy, to say the least. Maybe he’s had enough experience to work out some of the kinks, so to speak. He probably knows how to make a human feel good. He’d done a pretty solid job of making _her_ feel good with the both of them standing up with all their clothes on.

He’d probably tell her what he likes. She’d probably be able to feel that deep, resonant voice of his in her bones as she worked him. What would he sound like, in the middle of sex? Would her translator make his voice breathy and desperate in her ear? What would he sound like when he came?

Ultimately, Shepard’s not certain if she’s going to take him up on his offer, but it’s worth considering. And she does consider it, several times, until she’s breathless and sated and drifts slowly off to sleep.

*

In the mess the next morning Shepard feels almost normal. For a value of “normal” that means groping bleary-eyed for coffee and answering any and all attempts to draw her into conversation with grunts. Alenko is her preferred breakfast companion because he shares her opinion on chatter before noon, though probably some of that is due to his not-infrequent migraines.

Unfortunately the mess, while large by most space standards, is still pretty small for the amount of people it serves. Which means she has to sit at a table with other soldiers, some of whom do not agree with her and Alenko’s preferences for quiet mealtimes.

“Jenkins for the love of god, chew with your mouth closed, no one wants to see your food.”

“Don’t look and you wont have to spend so much time untwisting your panties.”

It’s been a trying time.

She’s debating the pros and cons of flinging the noisier occupants directly out of the room when Nihlus walks in and all conversation grinds to a halt. Shepard nearly sighs in relief before she looks up to see the source of the distraction and then a shot of panic flushes through her body as she thinks, _they know._ Then her brain splutters and coughs back to life and tells her she’s being an idiot because of course they don’t. All eyes are glued to the alien in their midst and no one is paying her the slightest bit of attention. _Get a grip, Shepard._

It’s amazing how much Nihlus can disrupt the normal workings of things just by showing up. Shepard can’t help but wonder what the reaction would be like if they _did_ know about him feeling her up in the gym. Not enough to ever want to find out, but she imagines the response would be… dramatic.

Nihlus sweeps the room and makes brief eye contact with her. They exchange a little nod of the head — completely neutral nothing to see here folks — and he walks over to a minifridge that had appeared in the corner of the room with no comment or fanfare. It’s locked, she realizes as he punches in a keycode and pulls out what she assumes is his breakfast. She hopes for his sake that turian MREs are better than the slop the Alliance gives them.

Conversation picks back up slowly once Nihlus settles in at the end of a table in the back of the room. The humans at the other end of the table bunch up as far away from him as they can and shoot him wary looks, but he ignores them with apparent ease. He’s wearing armor again today, which would seem out of place if _everything_ about him didn’t seem out of place. Still, she’s got to wonder if he really feels like he’s going to be attacked in the middle of breakfast. Everyone’s a little on edge, sure, but she has a little more faith in her fellow soldiers than _that_.

Not too much more faith, though. Conversation has started back up in loud whispers, and from what she can tell most of those conversations are about him. He can probably hear every word, too; Shepard’s learned the hard way how good turian hearing can be, and no one is really making an effort to be that quiet. She kind of wants to roll her eyes. She knew the moment she laid eyes on him that he was going to cause a stir, but she didn’t realize that it was all going to be so _highschool_.

“He doesn’t talk much, does he?” Alenko says in undertone, learning towards Shepard.

Shepard raises her brows and looks pointedly around the room. “Would you?”

“Heh. Fair. Still, it’s a little unnerving, isn’t it? No one really knows why he’s here — like a turian representative from the Hierarchy I could understand, but a Spectre? And have you tried talking to him? It’s like talking to a statue. A really tall, well-armed, spiky statue.”

Shepard, whose first conversation with said tall, well-armed, spiky statue was a discussion on the size, shape, and color of his penis, can’t quite school her expression as she stares at her Lt.

He raises his arms, a touch defensively. “I’m just saying,” he says “It might have helped if they, whoever “they” are, sent someone a little more willing to work with humans. Things are pretty tense as it is.”

“I don’t think he’s unwilling to work with humans,” Shepard says slowly. The magnitude of that understatement threatens to do serious damage to her composure. Good thing most of her facial muscles haven’t woken up yet. “I think he probably doesn’t want to force himself where he’s not welcome.”

“Yeah. Maybe you’re right,” Alenko shakes his head and smiles at her. “I think I’m getting a little stir-crazy, cooped up here. Jumping at shadows.”

Shepard opens her mouth to voice her _emphatic_ agreement when Jenkins pipes up.

“He gives me the creeps,” he says in a loud whisper that may as well be a shout across the room. Shepard glares warningly at him but he barrels onward, and she regrets all that time spent in the last week trying to rub the shine off his image of her. She doesn’t need that kind of moon-eyed hero worship on her team, but now it would be useful if he was just a little bit more intimidated by her. “I mean, it can’t be just me, right?”

“That’s enough Jenkins.”

“Sorry Commander. I’ve just never seen a turian up close before. And, like, there’s this really old vid that my parents made me watch once, and they look kinda like the monster in it. A little. ‘Cept it had no eyes and it’s spit — ”

“Jenkins, I know the food’s awful but that’s not an excuse to spew a bunch of bullshit out your mouth.”

Nervous laughter tumbles across the table and Jenkins reddens a little. It feels like kicking a puppy but she really needs to cut off this entire line of conversation and subtly is lost on Jenkins. She really doesn’t want to think about Nihlus hearing all that when he’s just trying to eat a meal in piece.

“Jenkins has a point though,” says an engineer, and Shepard nearly throws her plate at her face. This one’s also a bit shaky on the concept of a whisper, and the murmurs of agreement rippling across the table put paid to the concept of discretion. Shepard shoots a desperate look at Nihlus, who’s not currently looking at anyone but whose mandibles are making an odd side-to-side waving motion she has no idea how to interpret. “I’m honestly shocked they let one of them on the station, let alone put him with people.”

Shepard gapes at her. This one’s lucky she’s not assigned to the Normandy crew and therefore not under her command. She’d make her run laps until her legs fell off. Hell, she still might. “Are… are you seriously going to make me say ‘aliens are people too’?”

“Yeah, he creeps me out a little too but I’m with the commander, what the hell?” Great, no one is even pretending to whisper now. “We’re on a space station bigger than New York City, next to a giant space slingshot that can send us hurtling faster than light using technology no one completely understands and which connects thousands of galactic civilizations, and you’re complaining about aliens _breathing your air_?”

“See, this is the problem with you Gen-eezo’s,” cuts in an older NCO with a dramatic scar down the side of her face that rivals Shepard’s own, pointing a finger at the younger man who had just spoken. “You think everything is pretty gardenworlds and Utopian space societies from two hundred year old storybooks. If you had spent one _minute_ in Shanxi — ”

“Yeah, because no human nations have ever become allies after being on opposite sides of a war. Not that the relay 314 incident was _much_ of one — ”

“Don’t you dare parrot some alien propaganda at me, you little brat, I was there on the ground.”

Well this conversation has well and truly gone to shit. Shepard pinches the bridge of her nose as voices rise and other tables turn to watch the spectacle, occasionally shouting across the room to add their own two cents. Ironically, people seem to have forgotten Nihlus’s presence entirely, who for his part is keeping himself occupied with his food and whatever is scrolling down his omnitool. He looks unaffected, though his mandibles are still making that little swaying motion.

“— no one understands that more than the Commander. Shepard, you were on Mindoir, weren’t you?”

“Hell no,” Shepard says bluntly. “You can leave me the hell out of this.”

“But you’re a part of this,” insists the older NCO. “You grew up on Mindoir, you’ve spent the bulk of your career in the Skyllian Verge, you know exactly the kind of threat aliens pose to humanity.”

Something in Shepard’s core goes very, very still. The noise level in the room drops, as if she’s hearing it from under water. Shepard props her chin on one hand and leans toward the older woman, giving her her most pleasant smile. “Did you just bring up the wholesale slaughter of my entire family and childhood community to win an argument?”

The woman’s face spasms and her eyes dart to the side with a vaguely cornered look. Shepard’s heart pounds in her chest but she to forces herself to stay loose. Relaxed. This is not a firefight. She will not throw any punches. Her biotics will stay dormant and under her skin, for all they buck under her control like a cat on a leash.

“It’s interesting that you bring up the Skyllian Verge, actually,” Shepard says — calmly, calmly — into the now silent room _._ “You might be surprised at how often mercenary companies are hired to do other people’s dirty work in that sector. Muddies the waters, makes the real actors harder to track down, and why risk your own people or invest in training them when you can simply buy them? Makes sense, right?”

People are looking at her extremely nervously. Even Nihlus is staring at her with open interest. Shepard would sneer at them for cowering from one angry woman, but when she tries to blink away an odd blurriness in her eyes she realizes she’s seeing the world through a hazy blue sheen. She takes a few deep breaths and sips her coffee, singing the Mindoir song in her head — _calm, calm, you are the sunlight on still water —_ and smooths her biotics back down. Now is not the time to let her temper get the better of her.

“But there’s been an interesting trend in merc bands operating in the area, the last five-ten years,” She continues when her breathing is steady and her view of the world is clear and untinted. “An uptick in recruitment, from one race in particular: Humans. Used to be no one in the area would hire us to attack our own colonies but now the mercs have figured out what we knew all along; there are plenty of humans willing to ruin human lives for a paycheck. Always have been, always will be. And so now we have human mercs with knowledge of human customs, human language, and human technological capability, and they are sharing that information.”

“So what? You’re saying aliens are harmless teddy bears and we have no one to blame but ourselves?” one guy snorts derisively. “I never took you for an alien lover, Shepard.”

Shepard stares at the new speaker and with a twitch of a thought whips her now-empty disposable coffee cup at his head. So much for keeping her temper. “ _No_. I’m saying don’t drag me into your dumbfuck little arguments and expect me to say shit you want to hear.”

“Shepard…” Alenko murmurs quietly but Shepard is just, so beyond done. She almost knocks over her chair when she stands and picks her way between the crowded tables. The mouthy one with a target for a forehead opens his mouth as if to protest, only to promptly snap it shut when she fixes him with a glare. She knows she’s gonna hear it for using her biotics in front of the crew — _on_ the crew, no less — but honestly, fuck him. Fuck all of this.

She doesn’t look back at Nihlus before she sweeps out of the room. Hopefully they’ll all be too busy discussing her meltdown to harass him too badly.

*

Of course Nihlus finds her. Twenty minutes later she’s still sulking by the window, staring at the ship that’s going to be her home until she pisses off someone with enough pull to kick her off it.

Hell, at this rate she might never step foot on it at all.

“You followin’ me hot stuff?” she drawls.

“Got a little hot in there. Opted for a tactical retreat.”

“Smart.”

“I thought so,” he says, and then lets the silence stretch between them. This is the first time they’ve really spoken face to face since his little offer in the gym, but she’s too wound up to feel anything in particular about that. Everyone in the ‘pack knew better than to bring up Mindoir to her, and to have it dangled in front of her like that… And then that alien lover dig just to top it all off. It’s not that she’s _ashamed,_ she’s just. A little sensitive right now, maybe.

“That was quite a show in there,” Nihlus says, breaking the silence.

“Yeah, I’m good at that.”

“I admit, I was a little surprised.” He draws closer to her, standing at her shoulder in front of the window. She doesn’t look at him but she can feel his eyes on her. “I didn’t expect such a passionate defense.”

“Why, cuz I’m an ignorant trigger-happy jarhead?” Shepard snaps, and then she sighs. “Sorry.” She rubs her temples. “I’m sorry, you don’t deserve that.”

“You have nothing to apologize for.”

“Still. I shouldn’t be jumping down your throat, no matter how much this place is getting to me. I just — ” She rolls her shoulders. “I guess I’m just a little on edge.”

“Understandable.” He taps his finger softly on the window sill. “I can I ask you a question?”

Shepard braces herself, tension running all along her shoulders and down her back. If this is about his earlier offer, his timing could not be poorer. Thrumming with anger, fighting the urge to turn around and punch that woman in the face, she can’t imagine a moment she’s been less in the mood. Really she wants to tell him to fuck off and come back when she’s in a better mood but she doesn’t think she can figure out a way to say that nicely. “Sure.”

“Do you have a first name? Besides Commander, that is.”

“I… what?” Shepard chokes, jerking her head around to stare at him. “I — where did that even come from? Don’t you have access to that information?”

“Oh, I know you have a first name, I’m just wondering if you do.” Shepard blinks at him once, twice, and then the bubble of tension pops, spilling startled laughter into the air.

“Oh I see, he’s got jokes.” She says, and he joins her with that lovely musical turian laughter. “Yeah, asshole, I know my own first name. I just don’t use it.”

“Any particular reason?”

She pulls a face. “It’s just… Skye Shepard? It could have been worse, I guess. My brother’s name was _Phoenix_ for fucks sake. It’s just so… ugh, you know.”

“I really don’t.” Nihlus says. “Either my translator’s tripping over a few words, or I’m missing some context. I take it those are unusual names for humans?”

“Mmm, it’s like,” Shepard shifts her weight from foot to foot, trying to think of a way to explain embarrassing names to an alien. “You know that crack the older woman made, about utopian space societies in old storybooks? That was basically my parents. There were a lot of people like that I think, during the first wave of colonizing, and then again after we got an embassy on the Citadel and there was this big push to settle the Verge. People who had a little knowhow, a lot of ideals, and maybe weren’t entirely prepared for what was in store for them when they got to their new home. Skye is very much the kind of name someone like that might name their kid. I got a lot of shit for it when I went to the academy here, and eventually I guess I just stopped using it.” She shrugs. Every once in a while she gets it into her head that she should change that, work harder to wear her name with pride. But every time someone hears her name they think they know her story, and it fucking sucks that they’re usually right in all the ways that don’t matter. Either way feels like a disservice to her parents’ memory.

“Ah. You took that remark personally.”

“Yeah, I guess I did. But also they were being assholes, and they dragged me into their bullshit on purpose. Better they understand now what that’s gonna get them with me.”

“Sporting of you.”

Shepard grins at him. “Isn’t it just?”

She’s pretty sure by now that that answering expression is a smile, even though it looks way more threatening than any smile she’s ever seen. It’s nice, though, that they can share that. That he can find her after a big public blowout and put her at ease somehow. It makes her think a little harder about their last conversation.

She’s still half expecting him to bring it up, maybe ask what she’s waiting for or taunt her for being scared. He’d promised he wouldn’t though and so far he’s kept that promise. He just stands there, looking at the ship while she looks at him. She’s calming down, or maybe she’s just looking for a distraction, because suddenly she can’t get the question out of her head. What _is_ she waiting for? Is she scared? Maybe she just doesn’t want to, there’s really nothing about him that sparks any “ooh let me get on _that_ ” signals in her brain. Then again, when he had his hands on her her brain was pretty convinced he could show her a good time, so.

Nihlus turns to look at her and she promptly looks away. It’s those _eyes_. She thinks she remembers hearing somewhere how humans connect to or empathize better with beings with large eyes, whether they’re fictional constructs or different alien races. If the opposite was true that would certainly explain her difficulty meeting his gaze.

So fear, probably. That’s what’s holding her back. And maybe she should take that warning from her brain, take a step back before she crosses a line, but. Well. She didn’t get to where she is by listening to her better judgment, so why start now?

“It’s rude to stare, you know,” Shepard points out when the back of her neck starts to prickle. Nihlus laughs.

“Humans are very uncomfortable with stillness, aren’t they? More than Salarians, even. I’ve always found that very interesting.”

Shepard wets her lips, a nervous gesture she can sense Nihlus locking on to. “Stillness just means that something is waiting.”

“What’s waiting? For what?”

“For a mistake, an opening. No one ever knows what’s waiting until it’s right on top of you. And that’s the scariest part; the unknown.”

“Hm. If that was true, the Relay 314 Incident never would have happened.”

Shepard smirks. “Well, that’s the thing. The unknown is also the most interesting.”

Nihlus shakes his head. “You humans and your internal conflicts.”

“Tiresome, isn’t it?”

Nihlus turns and steps right into her personal space. Shepard tenses but doesn’t move away, forcing herself to tip her head back and look him in the eye.

“Nah,” he says, reaching a hand out slow enough for her to duck away if she wanted, and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I like the complexity.”

With that he turns and sets off the corridor, leaving Shepard shivering and wide eyed behind him.

*

_This is insane._

The lock on Nihlus’s door is a bright, scornful orange, ready and willing to summon him with the press of a button just as soon as Shepard stops dithering and _jumps._

This had seemed so much less insane when — actually, no, there was no point when this seemed less insane, just a point where she had to listen to the third or fourth rehash of the debate at breakfast and she snapped enough to recognize that, fuck it, she _did_ want to try this, at least once, and fuck any small minded asshole who would judge her for it. Including herself. Predictably, that invigorating moment of clarity has bled away and she now she finds herself making the rookie mistake of looking down before taking the jump. Fuck it.

She presses the button.

The door hisses and clatters open almost immediately, revealing Nihlus dressed once more in a soft looking tank and pants. Not the hip-hugging wrap ones from before; these are slightly longer, enough to drape over the base of his spurs, and the waistband hooks over one hip and drapes sideways to leave the other hip exposed. She wonders if that’s meant to be as provocative as it looks.

Nihlus steps back and beckons her in with a gesture gaze unreadable. To her, at least. He maybe looks looser than she’s seen him before, less tightly controlled. That could be a result of seeing him in such a private space, dressed in casual clothes meant to relax in. There’s a screen on the desk showing whatever he’d been working on when she came over. Another detail that seems strange because of how normal it is. Otherwise the room is small and rather cramped, barely enough to fit the desk and bunk and the two of them standing together. To her space sensibilities its practically a palace.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Nihlus says, his voice in her ear sounding warm and pleased. It’s soothing to be able to hear his tone when so much of his body language is opaque to her. She hopes the translation is accurate.

“I kept telling myself over and over how crazy I was,” she confesses, watching as he sits back at the desk and taps at the computer. She sits stays standing, not feeling quite prepared to sit on the bed, and feels a fresh wave of nerves. “I’d half convinced myself I’d made it all up in my head, or misinterpreted you.”

He laughs, not unkindly. “No, I definitely invited you here to have sex.”

Shepard coughs. “Wow, blunt.”

“I wanted to head off any risk of miscommunication. And just to be very clear, your presence here isn’t a commitment to anything. You can stop or slow things down or leave at any time, no hard feelings.

“Good to know,” Shepard says, voice still a little strained. “Thanks.”

“Of course. I’m just finishing this report and then you’ll have my full, _undivided_ attention.”

Shepard is torn between being grateful for the opportunity to get settled and the wish that she didn’t have the extra time to think. The bed is predictably narrow — would they both fit? — and he seems even bigger in such a small space. It’s also incredibly warm, almost uncomfortably so, and she imagines that would only get worse once they’re. Well. Moving around. What little floor space there is is covered in clothing, and she counts no less than three datapads scattered around the tiny space.

“I would have guessed turians were neater than this,” Shepard teases, mostly just to fill the air.

“Stereotyping, Shepard?” Nihlus teases back.

“I’m just saying! It’s the whole super-disciplined elite military society thing. I would have expected a little more organization, that’s all.”

“I haven't been in the turian millitary in a long time,” Nihlus says. “And when I was, I wasn’t very good at it.”

“You still managed to make it to Spectre,” Shepard says, crossing her arms and kind of perching at the edge of his desk.

“For a lot of people, that just proves my point.”

Shepard raises her eyebrows. “You’re an elite soldier working directly for the Citadel Council, the best of the best. You have access to information and technology that a lot of humans would cut off their own arms for, and you’re basically untouchable.”

“That’s something that appeals to you?”

“Are you kidding? Chasing down raiders and terrorists without the brass breathing down my neck, having _all_ the information, not just what some schmuck in an office decides I ‘need to know’? Being able to just skip all the pissing contests and posturing when the slaver leader I’m trying to pursue leaves Alliance space? Leading my _own_ crew, handpicked by _me,_ not dumped on me by some officer who thinks their greenie could use a tour or two doing shitwork? Relying on my own judgment without worrying about explaining myself to some desk jockey a hundred light years away? Sounds like fucking heaven.”

Nihlus turned from his screen entirely to look at her about halfway through her rant, watching her gesticulate wildly and vent out all the frustrations of her daily existence before they yanked her away from her people. She resents the transfer more every day, but _man_ are there things that she’s not gonna miss.

“A lot of turians, especially career military, don’t like the Spectre program,” Nihlus explains, once Shepard is able to find a sliver of chill. His mandibles are twitching and his translator tone sounds amused. “At best some see it as a necessary evil, a small group of people doing the dirty work so civilization can run smoothly, if imperfectly. They respect the title but it’s not a respectable occupation, if that makes any sense. At worst, a Spectre is a barbaric, sneaking, underhanded tool the council uses to grasp at power, and they have no place in civilized galactic society.”

“Wow that’s harsh. I mean, I guess I can see their point but,” Shepard shakes her head. “Law’s only as good as the infrastructure you have to enforce it. Obviously corruption’s a real danger, and in places like the Citadel or Earth or any other stable, well established city, there’s a lot to be said for taking the time to do it right and by the book. But that can kill smaller, more isolated communities.”

“How do you figure?”

“The longer you hesitate, the more people die,” Shepard says bluntly. “People love to talk about my Star of Terra until they stick me in a board room and see what happens when I open my mouth, but out there you can’t take any shit if you want to survive. The fact is that I broke a lot of rules holding the line at Elysium, and I would have broken a lot more to keep what happened to my colony from happening again. Out there people need action, not hand wringing and ethics debates..”

Nihlus tips his head at her. “You’re an interesting woman, Shepard.”

“I’m going to take that as a complement.”

“You should.” He reaches out to rest a hand on her thigh. With the long blunted talons and leathery skin, it looks like a claw. Shepard hesitates before reaching for him, flicking her gaze briefly to his for permission before running her fingertips across the back of his hand. It’s the first time she’s touched his bare skin, and it’s softer than it looks. Kind of like suede. She doesn’t think she imagines the shiver that ripples through his body as she traces the bones on the back of his hands all the way down to his talon tipped fingers. She turns his hand over and does it again to his palm, cradling it in her other hand. His breathing gets a little heavier.

“Is this okay?” she murmurs.

“Absolutely,” he assures her, eyes fixed on where their hands meet. “It’s just… intimate. We almost always wear gloves.”

“Because of the talons?” Shepard trails one finger all the way down to one of his and taps at the dulled tip of each one. “Do you usually keep them filed? For humans?”

“Yes to your first question. As for your second, I only file them when I think I might need to.”

“So you did this for me?” The idea of that makes her absurdly pleased. It’s such a little gesture, but the idea that he would invite her into his bed and then do something to make her safer and more comfortable just in case… Talons are probably a turian’s last level of defense, she realizes. Rarely used, probably as rarely as she uses her fists and definitely a last resort, but. Still. One of his weapons, if he made a point to keep them sharp normally, and he took the edge off them for her.

“How do you do anything with so few fingers?” She murmurs, still tracing the lines of his hand with her fingertips.

Nihlus offers up his other hand for inspection. “How do you keep track of so many?”

She laughs. “Point. I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

Nihlus reaches up and runs his fingers through the loose fall of her hair. It’s almost long enough to do something with besides tucking it behind her ears, which means its also long enough to be a hassle. She’s been thinking of cutting it — she has no idea how she did it when she was a kid — but Nihlus’s obvious fascination makes her glad she hasn’t yet.

“You like hair,” she observes.

“I do. It’s so soft, and the ways it moves…” He scratches her scalp a bit, making Shepard shiver. “I could play with your hair for hours.”

“I appreciate the sentiment,” She says with a wicked grin that’s only half bravado. “But to be honest I was hoping for something a little more involved than that.”

“I’m very glad to hear you say that,” Nihlus rumbles. Abruptly, he grips her thighs and tugs her bodily into his lap so that she ends up straddling him on the chair. It shouldn’t have worked so well; she was really only half sitting and the angle was awkward, but he handled her weight as though she weighed barely more than a feather.

“Shit! You’re strong.”

“You’re half my size and completely devoid of a metallic exoskeleton,” he points out reasonably.

“Well then I take it back, I’m not impressed at all,” Shepard says breathlessly, heart pounding. He chuckles and snakes an arm around her waist. Her head is only a little higher than his like this, and he looks up at her with his mandibles slightly loose. This close she can see the plates on his face shift a little. She places gentle fingers on his cheekbone.

“Is this a smile?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” she says, giving him a little smile of her own. “Good.”

Before she can pull her hand away, he captures it and presses it to his lips. The gesture is rough and unfamiliar with his alien mouth, but it warms her just the same.

“Can you feel that?” she asks. “On your… lips? I guess they’re lips, right? They seem pretty flexible.”

“Most flexible plates on the turian body,” he confirms. “They sort of cover my lips, for protection, but they have the typical musculature underneath. I can feel a little but only pressure, temperature, that sort of thing. Same goes for most of the rest of my plates, if I can feel anything at all. Any true sense of touch I only really have on my bare skin.”

“So kissing’s not a thing then.”

“I like kissing,” he says. “As a gesture if not for the sensation. It’s one of those things turians picked up from the asari, so it’s not considered odd. But before we get to that we should talk about allergies.”

“I don’t have a levo allergy.”

“None at _all_?”

Shepard shrugs. “They gave me a bunch of treatments when I was a kid. All the children on Mindoir did. They’ve always seemed to do their job pretty well.”

Nihlus’s mandibles drop down low on his face, pressing tight. “I’ve heard those kind of treatments can fail pretty spectacularly later in life.”

“So I’ve been told. But the Alliance doctors say I wont be in much danger of that until my mid fifties, just given the generation of the treatments I had, and they’re keeping a close eye on things.”

“Good to know, but we’ll play it safe,” Nihlus says, reaching into one of the desk drawers and pulling out an epipen.”

“…Usually people take very different things out of drawers when they’re having the safe sex talk.”

Nihlus laughs and wow Shepard can feel that in her _thighs._ And higher. “Don’t worry, I have condoms in there too, if we decide to go for that. I just don’t want to risk your throat swelling shut when I kiss you.”

“Sexy.”

“Well if you really like that sort of thing then there are safer ways to go about it.”

Shepard snorts and smacks him lightly on the shoulder. “Just shut up and kiss me.”

Kissing a turian is odd, but kind of pleasant. His lips only move a little against her own, but they’re warm and the slightly rough texture feels nice. There are still all the things she likes best about kissing; the warmth and the closeness, strong hands stroking and petting her back and sides, squeezing her ass and pulling her close. His body doesn’t yield to hers the way a human’s would, but pressing against him like this is not nearly as uncomfortable as she thought it might be. Nothing pointy or spiky is jabbing her where it shouldn’t, at least.

And he makes these _sounds_. She knows she’s missing a good deal of complexity — she’s just not physically capable of hearing the full range of his voice — but what she can hear is plenty gratifying on its own. His voice reverberates in the deep barrel of his chest and she’s pressed so close that it feels like it rumbles straight through her. Sitting here, on his lap, surrounded by the dusty, metallic scent of him and feeling him literally vibrate with pleasure already feels like sex. There’s nothing awkward or unnatural here, just two bodies coming together and feeling good, and she feels for the first time like she can relax a little. Until Nihlus slips her some tongue.

Shepard makes an undignified squeaking noise and jerks back. “Sorry! Sorry, that was,” she searches frantically for a nicer word than weird. “….Weird. Sorry.”

“It’s alright, I can keep it to myself.” Nihlus sounds unconcerned. Shepard hopes he’s actually unconcerned, and her translator isn’t glitching out when he’s actually kind of offended, because she really, really didn’t mean to offend him. It had felt good! Really surprisingly good, actually, but then the tongue and the _taste_ and she’s suddenly jarringly reminded that she is making out with an _alien_. She is sitting on an _alien’s_ lap and she’s going to have sex with an _alien_ and he is so, so very not human. Just about as not human as one can get while still being…. Physiologically compatible and god, even her thoughts are offensive, what if she made him self conscious or —

“Hey,” he says, touching her cheek. “I know this is new for you, but I’ve done this plenty of times. You don’t make a habit of interspecies sex without developing a thick skin and a tolerance for a little awkwardness.”

Shepard takes a deep breath. “Sorry. God, I feel like a virgin highschooler, this is ridiculous.”

“Relax,” he soothes. “I’ve got you. We can go back to what we were doing before. You seemed to like that.”

“I am a goddamn N7 marine,” Shepard grumbles. “I am not afraid of a little kissing.”

She presses their mouths together and its. It’s really different than kissing a human with a human tongue. His tongue is longer, and thinner, and more flexible. More can fit in Shepard’s mouth than she would have expected and it’s just kind of… this wriggling, writhing mass of muscle in her mouth that tastes vaguely sweet and feels a little cold in sharp contrast to the rest of him, like he’s been breathing through his mouth and —

Shepard pulls back. “Nope. Sorry. Still weird.”

Nihlus laughs, which is strangely reassuring. She probably hasn’t offended him?. “No tongue kissing, got it. Is that a no on tongue in general, or…?”

Shepard thinks, absently running her hands over Nihlus’s crest and chest and carapace, feeling out the shape of him. “I did like it when you licked my neck before, though I had a bit of warm-up. I don’t know. Definite “no” for the mouth, anywhere else will be on a case-by-case?”

“Sounds fair,” Nihlus agrees. He pulls her close again, nuzzles at the curve of her neck before whispering, “I’ve got a pretty good idea about a place you’ll _really_ like it, though.”

It takes a minute, and then Shepard shivers all over at just the thought. “Fuck.”

“Mhm. I’m going to want to take my time getting there though. Haven’t done this in a while.”

 _Sex in general or sex with a human_ , Shepard wants to ask, but Nihlus curls his hand in her hair and buries his face in her neck and she lets herself get swept away again.

When she’s feeling a little bolder she lets her hands wander a bit. His arms have patches of plating on the upper, and the undersides are completely bare from shoulder to talon. His sides, likewise, are exposed, and he gasps promisingly when she smooths her hands down to his waist. The sound he makes when she does it again, this time with a light scratch of her nails, is _delicious_.

“Sensitive?” she asks, tucking her face in the snug space between his crest and his neck, licking at the soft skin there. Nihlus’s hips jerk under her and she feels an odd sort of movement under where she’s sitting.

“Mmmfuck, Shepard. If you keep that up, we might need to relocate.”

“As long as its to a bed,” she says boldly, risking a few gentle nips to his warm skin.

Nihlus growls holds her close, rising to his feet and holding her easily as he navigates the tiny space and turns to dump her gently on the bed. Shepard laughs as she bounces a little, then gasps as he crawls over her. She feels like she’s being stalked by some large predator, flat on her back and pinned by his hungry gaze. For a moment she has to lock her muscles to keep from scrambling away as a spike of some base instinct shoots through her brain. It passes quickly though, or maybe it’s just some wires crossing in her brain because the fear quickly melts into heat and has her reaching for him.

He doesn’t actually lay on top of her. Which is fortunate, because that breastbone looks like it could cave in her rib cage, but he does brace himself on his hands and knees, giving them each space to just look at each other. She reaches up to trace the lines of his chest plates, following along until she reaches the arch of his crest and then his shoulders. Shepard does like broad-shouldered men, though Nihlus takes it to something of an extreme. The more she touches, the more she decides she likes it. She especially likes the taper down to his proportionally tiny waist and the contrasting wide shelf of his hips. She’s still not sure if she quite finds him attractive per se, but there’s definitely an aesthetic appeal. Also, she’s decided that those low slung pants are definitely provocative. They’re nearly hanging off his hips now and she can sort of not quite clearly get a peek at what’s underneath them.

There are two bare patches of flesh on either side of his waist that aren’t covered by his shirt or his pants or any plates. It feels perfectly natural to fit her hands there and stroke a little, just to enjoy a body to press against and hold. When she teases her fingers under the hem of his shirt as a prelude to drawing it off the move feels almost normal.

Nihlus reacts so strongly she almost jerks her hands away. He squeezes his eyes shut tight and trembles a little, and suddenly there’s no hiding the bulge in his pants, or the hint of something bluish and shiny wet down his waistband she couldn’t see before.

“Wow,” Shepard breaths, stroking a little more to see what other reactions she can coax out of him. “That’s a sensitive spot for you.”

“Mph,” he groans, lowering himself just enough so that he can press his face into the crook of her neck. It’s a little uncomfortable; there are a few of his hard bits digging into her much squishier ones, his chest being a major obstacle. It’s like the prow of an ocean vessel designed to cut through water the way it juts out into her space, but as long as Nihlus doesn’t forget himself and go any lower and she takes shallow breaths, it’ll be fine. She can lift him off with biotics if she _really_ has to, but she doesn’t think it’ll be necessary.

She does use her grip on his sides to pull his hips a little closer, so he can fit his cock in the groove where her thigh meets her body and rub a little into the soft space there. Nihlus moans, and this close she can feel it in her _bones._ It feels good. _She_ feels good, powerful and vulnerable and dangerous with this big strong creature covering her, taking pleasure in her body and practically drowning in it. The heat of his body and the room and their closeness builds up, making her feel heady and breathless, eager for more. He presses even closer and she scrapes the palms of her hands on his plates, grips her thighs tight around the rock solidity of his hips. She’s dizzy. She revels in it. She’s breathless — no, actually, she just can’t breath. She tries to draw breath deep into her lungs and his chest stops the movement, keeps her breath shallow. She tries again, and then again. _I can’t breath_ she thinks, and before she can stop it panic spikes sharply into her brain and she starts struggling, shoving him away and experiencing a brief moment of terror when she’s not quite able to.

And then he’s gone. The weight, the resistance, all of it before instinct could take over and put power behind her struggles. She takes deep, sweet lungfulls of air, pressing her hand to her chest in a vain effort to force her heart rate down. It takes a few moments for her to register Nihlus crouched at the end of the bed as far from her as the small space would allow him, watching her try to calm herself.

“Are you okay?” He asks as her breathing slows.

“Yeah. Yeah.” The depth of her overreaction hits her and she can feel her face start to warm. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to apologize for. Take as long as you need.”

“I couldn’t breath,” Shepard tries to explain. “I was fine at first. More than fine, to be honest, and then…”

“And then you weren’t.”

“I guess not.” She squeezes her eyes shut and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Oh my god, I’m being so ridiculous.”

“You’re not. You were just overwhelmed. I, ah,” he coughs, a gesture of embarrassment that just seems so human to her that she can’t help but smile, “Got a little carried away. Sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize either.” She sighs, then laughs wryly. “Damn. I really killed the mood here, didn’t I?”

“I wouldn’t say dead,” Nihlus drawls. “Just resting. Can I touch you now?”

“Yeah, of course,” she says with an ease that surprises her, and reaches for him. She stays upright this time and he does too, sitting at her side and letting his hands wander. When he nuzzles back into the crook of her neck, a favorite spot apparently, she tips her head to the side and he makes a pleased noise and tugs her close.

“You’re so soft,” he murmurs, hands dipping just a little underneath her tank top, the drag of blunted talons making her shiver.

“You can take that off if you want,” Shepard says boldly. Nihlus hums greedily and does just that, one hand following the path of her shirt’s hem up her stomach as he drags it off of her. She wriggles out of her sports bra as he drops the shirt off the side of the bed. He groans, low and heartfelt in her ear

Shepard twists around to settle her back against Nihlus’s rumbling chest, tipping her head back as he runs his hands over every inch of her bare skin. It’s easier for her to settle back into his grasp like this, where she feels free enough to breath properly and can listen to him as he touches her. She reaches back to hook one arm around his neck, tucking it snugly between the warm skin of his neck and the arch of his crest. He licks and nuzzles at the side of her neck as he slides his hands up to cup her breasts.

This is different from most of her sexual encounters, beyond the obvious. She’s gotten used to being rushed along to the main event, whether due to time constraints or just plain impatience. Nihlus is methodical and unhurried, taking his time coaxing her body to thrumming wakefulness. In other circumstances it might have been enough to drive _her_ into impatience, but now she luxuriates in the easy, simple pleasure of being touched.

“There’s a spot,” Nihlus murmurs into her throat. “Under my fringe. Where the neck plates stop. Could you… rub it a little? Gently.”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Shepard agrees, gasping as he presses his thumbs to her nipples. Just giving them a little attention, without the tugging or pinching that she hates.

She feels the shudder run through his whole body when she finds that spot. The resonant humming in his chest drops deeper, and Shepard feels the ridge of his cock pressing against her back. She wiggles back into it, giving him plenty of pressure to rub against as she toys with the smooth skin under his fringe, experimenting with pressure and scratchiness. Nihlus leaves off the attention to her breasts in favor of wrapping his arms around her and holding on for dear life, moaning gustily and rocking his hips against her.

She has to shift a little as she drapes back against him. There’s a _lot_ about him that can dig uncomfortably into her spine but she does manage to find a position that’s more or less comfortable as one of his hands starts smoothing down her stomach, and then lower.

“Mmm, fuck,” Shepard moans, spreading her legs as he rubs her through her sweats.

“My fingers aren’t quite so useful here,” Nihlus murmurs in her ear as he pointedly taps a dulled talon tip against her. “But I’ve got another idea I think you’ll like. Can I?”

It takes a second for Shepard to figure out what he’s getting at, then she flushes all over. “Well, _I’m_ sure as fuck not going to stop you.”

“Heh.” He squeezes her close for a second then lets her go so they can arrange themselves more comfortably. She ends up sitting at the edge of the bed with him kneeling on the floor between her legs, wedged between the bed and the desk. Shepard laughs.

“When I first walked in here I was amazed at how much room there was,” she says, putting her foot in his lap and toying with the edge of his shirt with a toe. “You should take this off.”

“There’s room enough,” he assures her, catching her ankle as she presses the arch of her foot against the bulge at the front of his pants. His eyes flutter shut and his hips jerk up against the pressure. Intrigued, she starts rubbing with a few slow strokes. He just kneels there, letting her work him up, breathing heavily.

“Shirt,” she reminds him hoarsely, after a minute of this.

“Mmm, only if you ease up on that a moment. I’m not… I can’t…”

A wicked grin spreads across Shepard’s face as she keeps right on doing what she’s doing, watching his muscles tense as he fights for control, listening to his breathing get faster, more uneven.

“Yeah, okay,” she says lightly when he looks like he’s going to collapse, pulling her foot away. He gives her a _look_ that makes her laugh and he pulls his shirt off in one smooth motion. But he doesn’t reach for her right away when he drops it to the ground, choosing instead to sit back on his heals and look up at her for a few long moments. Shepard finds herself wishing he wouldn’t give her quite so much time to think, which probably isn’t fair of her. If she’s going to do this, she should do it, not pretend to be swept away in the heat of the moment and brush it all under the rug the next morning. And something is settling in her brain the more she looks at him, the more she reconciles those plates and the sharp points of those teeth and those unsettlingly small, bright eyes with this person kneeling in front of her. A person who is gentle and respectful in bed, with a thick skin (ha!) and a wicked, bone-dry sense of humor.

She puts a hand on a sort of shiny spot on one of Nihlus’s chest plates, feeling his eyes on her. Most of his plates are rough and dull but there are places that have a more polished, metallic sheen. Are those spots where his armor rubs or do they occur naturally? Can turian plates get sore or rubbed thin? Do they stop growing at adulthood or grow their whole lives? Do turians molt? Shepard would ask, but she’s pretty sure questions about molting are deeply unsexy regardless of the species. She grins. A universal constant.

“Like what you see?” Nihlus says, cutting through her thoughts. Shepard grins wider.

“Yeah, actually. I think I do.”

Nihlus chuckles deep in his throat, leaning in and bracing his hands on the top of his thighs. “Sweet talker.”

“I’m renowned throughout the galaxy for my diplomacy and subtlety of speech,” Shepard agrees

“What a coincidence; I am also known throughout the galaxy for my skill with my mouth.”

Shepard snorts, covers her face, and dissolves into undignified giggles. “Oh my god, that was so bad.”

“Well, I never said talking was the thing I was skilled at,” Nihlus allows, making her laugh harder.

“Well, maybe you should play more to your strengths.”

“Hmm, you might be right.” He leans forward to press a kiss to her stomach. “Kind of hard to do with pants in the way, though.”

“I love a problem with an easy solution,” Shepard says, lifting her hips up so Nihlus can hook his hands in the waistband of her sweats and pull them off in one smooth motion. It’s a little nerve wracking, being completely bare in front of him. She hasn’t been particularly bothered by nudity for a long time, but it’s different with someone who really _doesn’t_ have all the same parts. He scratches his nails through her pubic hair a few times, which is _weird_ , and then he hooks his arms under her legs and grips firmly at the top of her thighs.

“Tell me if it gets weird, and I’ll stop,” he assures her, looking up from between her legs. She’s not precisely surprised at how she believes him but she is, a little, at how comforting the assurance is.

She smiles down at him and touches one cheek plate with her thumb. “Knock yourself out, babe.”

“You know,” Nihlus muses. “That phrase still doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Shepard’s laughter is cut off by a long, dragged out moan.

What was so strange in her mouth is… okay, yeah, still pretty fucking strange down there, but with the added bonus of feeling _amazing_. His tongue is smooth and kind of thin, but strong and flexible as it works her clit and laps at the rest of her. The lack of lips is something of a hindrance; Shepard likes being _properly_ eaten out, thanks very much, and men who hang back and lap halfheartedly at her with the tip of their tongue do not impress her one bit.

Still, Nihlus turns out to be very good at working with what he’s got. He braces his top lip-plate on her pubic bone, keeping anything sharp out of the way of anything sensitive, and just goes to town on anything he can reach with his tongue. Which turns out to be damn near everything because that fucker is _long_. He keeps at it for far longer that she would have given him credit for, taking his sweet time on her, mixing up pressure and speed, occasionally just straight up tongue-fucking her before circling back around to her clit. It’s absolutely the most devastating bout of cunnilingus she’s ever had, and she’s practically stuffing her fist in her mouth trying to keep the noise down.

Objectively, it’s probably pretty creepy to look at; that obscenely long tongue in the mouth full of teeth wriggling all around and inside her. She can’t see any of that, though, not from where she’s braced against the wall with her legs hanging over the edge of the bed. With the free hand not currently occupied with keeping all her embarrassing noises down she reaches to press and stroke that spot under his fringe he likes so much. The effect is not unlike having a motorcycle engine rev up between her legs, and his eyes slip shut in pleasure as he redoubles his efforts on her.

“Fuuck,” she groans, her muscles tensing all over. “Fucking. Fuck, I am so close, Nihlus, I — ”

Nihlus hums, and of course the vibrations run right through her cunt, weak but just enough at just the right time to have her back arching as she tumbles right over the edge. Nihlus grips her hips and licks her right through the shudders of her orgasm until Shepard jerks violently and shoves him away when the oversensitivity hits.

“Sweet mother of fuck,” Shepard says once she manages to catch her breath. “Where the hell did you learn to do _that_?”

“That’s one thing that translates very well from sex with turian women,” Nihlus says smugly, shifting up to sit next to her on the bed. Shepard presses close when he drapes an arm around her shoulder. “Unfortunately, human men tend to be less impressed.”

Shepard snorts, covers her face, and laughs. Objectively it’s not even all that funny, but everything about her is so loose and relaxed right now. Nihlus laughs too, deep and warm and resonant. He’s very obviously still hard, the front of his pants a little damp-looking.

“You planning on using that thing or are you just gonna wave it around at me?” She teases once the hilarity subsides.

“Spirits, I hope so,” he says with a fervor that makes her laugh again, pressing little kisses across her collarbone and down the curve of her shoulder. “I want to fuck you so bad. Will you let me?”

“‘Let’ you,” Shepard snorts. “Christ. How are we doing this? Do you have condoms? Because I thought of bringing some but I’m pretty sure they’re not like. One size fits all.”

Nihlus reaches over to the desk to retrieve a familiar-looking plastic wrapped packet. Huh. Some things really are universal. “Human ones are the wrong shape,” he agrees. “Why don’t you ride me? Go at your own pace.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” Shepard says, plucking the condom from his hand and swinging around to straddle him as he settles himself against the wall at the head of his bed. He helpfully lifts his hips so she can shove off the sweats, giving her an eyeful of exactly what it is he has going on down there. His cock is thick and has a sort of muddy blue color to it. She reaches out tentatively, then rolls her eyes at herself and takes a proper hold of it, making Nihlus let out a shaky groan and tighten his grip on her thighs. It’s hot and heavy in her hand and oddly slick. He smells musky, but not unpleasant.

“Okay?” Shepard asks huskily, risking a firmer grip.

“More than,” Nihlus assures her, voice tight. “I’ll tell you if anything feels bad. Take your time.”

Solid advice, so Shepard takes it. His cock is… very differently shaped than a human one. It’s bumpy and ridged in a manner that reminds her a little of his plating, though his skin here is all silk-smooth and soft. The tip is tapered and turned up and there’s some kind of bulb near the base. From the way his plates are arranged she suspects his dick might be retractable, which is a cool trick. That also might be the source of the shiny-wet slickness of his cock. She catches herself wondering what it tastes like, and then she can’t stop herself from wondering what it tastes like. And why not? Nihlus certainly got a mouthful of _her_.

“Can I suck you?” she asks.

Nihlus’s groan reverberates in the tiny room and he shudders all over. His cock twitches in her hand. “I would _love_ if you sucked me,” He says. “But I’m to wound up to enjoy it for long enough.”

Shepard laughs, opting to just tear open the condom; she’s ready to get a move on thing anyway. “It’s the lips, isn’t it?”

“It is absolutely the lips.”

“Ha! Knew it. Is there a trick to this?”

“Just make sure the narrowest part is right under the base, to hold it in place.”

Getting the narrow bit over the bulb is tricky and Shepard fumbles it a little. Nihlus is patient with her though, lets her work it out and does not get one bit softer in the process, which is a little gratifying. Although for all she knows maybe getting soft when slightly distracted is just a human thing. Once it’s done Shepard experiences a throb of trepidation right at the base of her throat, but it’s real late in the game for second thoughts or hesitations so she slaps a lid on that and leaves the second guessing for later. The tried and true Skye Shepard Way.

“You must be the first man I’ve ever slept with who doesn’t bitch just a little bit about wearing a condom,” Shepard muses, lining herself up. “And you probably can’t get me sick and _definitely_ wont get me pregnant.”

“I find the fact that you’re not the first woman to tell me than incredibly alarming.” Nihlus says. His voice is rich with all the lovely layered tones that sound as though they are _just_ out of her hearing. “But also I just like to last longer than thirty seconds.”

“Well, I’m sure as fuck not gonna complain about that,” Shepard pants, sinking down slowly. “Shiit. _Fuck_ that is so good.”

Nihlus makes a wordless, indescribable sound of agreement, sliding his hands back up to her hips as she works herself down the girth of him. That tapered tip made it seem so deceptively easy at first, but he’s thicker than she thought and that bulb gives her a lot of trouble. But she perseveres, and all those bumps and ridges drag deliciously inside her as she tries to take all of him, making her squeeze up around him. Nihlus doesn’t have a whole lot of leverage with them positioned like this, but he does manage to thrust up into her with these little rolls of his hips and Shepard just keeps rocking herself down that one last —

“Ah!” She shouts, gripping his arms tight as the thickest part of that bulb sinks into her all at once, filling her so quickly that all she can do for a few long moments is squeeze and shudder and ride it out. Nihlus wraps one arm around her back and digs the other in her hair, pulling her face into his neck and trembling as she struggles to adjust.

When Shepard can breath again she tries to lean back so she can start fucking him properly, but his grip on her tightens and he makes a pained noise. “Please don’t move.”

Shepard freezes. “You okay?”

“You keep,” a shudder rocks through him. “ _Squeezing_ me.”

“Mmm,” Shepard agrees dreamily, squeezing him again. “It feels good.”

Nihlus uses his grip on her hair to tug her into a kiss, his thumb stroking her cheek while his other arm still pins her in place. She lets him keep her still, though the lull in the action gives her the chance to catalog her discomforts. For instance, his plates are rubbing her nipples _raw_ , and his sharp hip bones are digging uncomfortably into the back of her thighs. The plates around the base of his cock also keep catching at her hair, which… is really very much not ideal. His talons grip just on the edge of too hard, even with the trim, and she can barely figure out where to put her hands and nearly brains herself when her eyes slip shut and she goes to rest her head on his shoulder.

But ultimately all that is just background noise. She feels amazing, all full up and warm and touched all over, wickedly satisfied as she watches her partner struggle for control. Even sex with humans tends to be a little gross and uncomfortable, it’s just that when the sex is good none of that really matters. And Shepard is feeling so very, very good right now, that first orgasm having primed her body into feeling every shift and stretch to its fullest, sensitized to the smallest twitch of his cock inside her as he drags himself back from the edge. It’s such a tease though, feeling him inside her and not being able to do anything about it, and she has to struggle to keep herself still.

She cups the sides of his jaw and presses a kiss to his lips before resting her forehead on his. “ _Please_ tell me I can move now,” she begs.

“Yeah. No way I’m going to last very long though.”

“Don’t worry,” Shepard pants. “Me neither.” She snakes a hand between their bodies as she rocks up and down on his lap, slowly at first but picking up speed when Nihlus’s grip on her hips urges her faster. Every once in a while that bulb pops out and presses back in, spreading her wide and making her jerk each time, driving her crazy with those slick, wet noises as he punches in and out of her.

Shepard herself is back to her fist in the mouth routine, trying desperately to keep her voice down enough to keep it from slipping into the corridor. She’s not entirely confident that she succeeds. Though that may be a moot point, depending on how Nihlus’s rich, multi layered tone carries. Maybe a human wouldn’t be able to tell, despite how obviously desperate and on edge he sounds to _her._ After all, she has a few more context clues in the form of the gradually tightening grip at her hips and the growing strength and frenzy of his thrusts into her. She works her fingers wildly at her own clit and feels the peak coming.

“I can’t,” Nihlus moans brokenly. “I’m too close Shepard, I can’t — ”

“You don’t have to,” Shepard assures him, bringing her free hand up to that spot under his fringe. “Just let it go, don’t worry, I’m right here with you.”

It’s the sounds Nihlus makes as he comes that tip her over the edge, desperate and thrumming and filling every square inch of her body. She grinds down on the bottom of one last thrust and shakes with the force of her second orgasm right around Nihlus’s twitching cock.

“Fuuck,” Shepard groans, slumping down to hid her face in Nihlus’s neck. “Fuck fuck _fuck_.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, patting her absently on the back. “Yeah.”

Shepard rolls bonelessly off him, more out of necessity than desire; several patches of her skin have been rubbed raw by his plates. That kind of thing is way more difficult to ignore when not actively enjoying the fuck of her life. She scrubs her face with her hands.

“That was so good,” she groans into her palms. “How was that so good.”

“Practice. And a great deal of natural talent.”

“Don’t mock me, I’m having a crisis.”

“Over what?” Nihlus snorts, rifling through a drawer in his desk. “Opening you up to a whole knew galaxy of sexual gratification?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Shepard whines.

“Well then, I am very sorry for fucking you into a pile of satisfied goo,” Nihlus says, not actually sounding sorry at _all_ , the bastard. “Maybe this will help redeem me.”

The thing he was looking through the drawer for turns out to be some kind of lotion. It’s cool and soothing when he smooths it on the rubbed raw patches on her skin. Shepard moans as the uncomfortable sting eases. She hadn’t even though she was all that bothered until the discomfort was eased away. “You are suspiciously well-prepared.”

“This many humans in one place, I figured there was a non-zero chance of at least one person being bored or curious enough to give an interspecies encounter a spin.”

Shepard frowns. She feels like that’s probably somewhat offensive to one or both of them, but it’s not like he’s wrong. “I’m not going to pretend I don’t appreciate the distraction, at least.”

“Glad to hear it.” Nihlus drawls, moving from her breasts to her thighs. “Do any of these spots itch, or are they just sore?”

“Just sore.”

“How about your throat? And tingling or tightness?”

“All clear, doc,” Shepard laughs. “I told you, I don’t have allergies.”

“Allergic reactions in humans are _absurd_ ,” Nihlus grumbles. “Habituation can ease them, but too much exposure can _cause_ them, it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.”

Shepard smiles up at him, something warm blooming in her chest. She reaches up to touch gentle fingers to his jaw. “You’re sweet.”

“You sound surprised.”

Shepard frowns, thoughtful. “I guess I am. Never thought of a turian being sweet.”

Nihlus gives her a long look. “We’re all just people, Shepard.”

Shepard huffs. “I _know_ that,” she says, running a hand through her hair. Ugh. Defensiveness really cuts into the afterglow. “I just. Never thought about it. I don’t really talk to aliens much.”

Nihlus _clicks_ his mandibles sharply against the side of his face. Shepard’s willing to bet that’s an indication of some kind of annoyance and she shrinks in on herself. She’s not a bigot or anything, she’s just… not used to certain things.

“Shepard,” Nihlus says slowly. “You know humans are aliens too, right?”

Shepard pulls herself to a sitting position, wishing she weren’t quite so naked for this conversation. “Yeah, I _know_. I just…”

“You never thought of it that way.”

“…Yeah.”

She hates feeling like this, like some ignorant hick from a backwater planet. Like, she _is_ an ignorant hick from a backwater planet, but that doesn’t make constantly sticking her foot in her mouth any more pleasant. She knows she could have done better; sought out new experiences, gone to the Citadel on leave once or twice rather than clinging to the colonies like a security blanket. Hell, she even could have just spent more time at one of the bigger colonies with a bigger alien presence.

Nihlus sighs and puts a hand on her back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring you down. You’re far from the only human that thinks that way. A lot of people resent that, but I think it’s that you’re all just so new to the concept of an intergalactic society. People forget that it takes time to grow into.”

“You make us all sound like children,” Shepard grumbles

“As a species, you kind of are. You just don’t have the knowledge and experience yet. That comes with time.”

“We are an impatient bunch,” Shepard concedes, slumping a little to rest her head on his shoulder, not at all cheered by either the concept that the majority of humanity is closed minded and stubborn, or the dawning suspicion that she’s probably part of the problem. “You know, I’ve never even been to the Citadel?”

“…You’re joking.”

“I am not,” Shepard says with a twist of her mouth. “I always stay in the colonies during leave. Someone’s always in their harvest season somewhere, and there’s lots to do. I grew up on a farm, and that kind of thing’s hard to shake no matter how long I stay in space.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Nihlus says slowly. “Have you ever lived anywhere not majority humans?”

Shepard scrunches up her face, thinking. “Uh, Elysium, I guess? There’s a relatively high saturation of aliens — or, nonhumans I guess — since it’s turned out to be such a hub colony. After… after Mindoir I went to the military academy here, and let me tell you, going to school with a bunch of rich human kids did not endear me to the fancy space station city life. Boot camp was on earth, so all humans again except that time the kids were poorer. After that I bounced around a lot until ICT, and then Elysium.”

Nihlus slides his arm up her back to run gentle talons through her hair. She’s not exactly comfortable pressed against his side like this, but it turns out the touch and the closeness is still nice even with a carapace in the way. “No wonder you’re so clueless.”

Shepard flips him the bird, but she laughs too. “Yeah, I — I guess I’m not proud of it. The attack… Whatever, I should have known better, or dealt with it instead of…” Shepard groans and rubs at her face. “Fuck, I’m just an asshole. Let’s leave it at that.”

“I think you’re maybe being a bit harsh on yourself,” Nihlus says lowly. “No one could blame you for being suspicious about a turian Spectre on a human station. Hell, most turians are suspicious of turian Spectres. But you came up to me the other night and you were decent. Decency is in short supply in this galaxy. Puts you head and shoulders above just about everyone here.”

“There’s no bar low enough that someone wont trip on it,” Shepard says wryly. “A lot of someones, in this case. Also, what exactly is your measure for ‘decency’ here? The first question I asked you was how big your penis is.”

“In your defense, that ended up being something of a relevant question.”

She blinks at him blankly for a few beats until it clicks and her eyes widen. She bursts out into a mess of laughter. Nihlus joins her, his resonant chuckles filling the room.

“Oh my god,” Shepard gasps. “Oh my god you _fucked_ him.”

“What did you think?” Nihlus laughs. “How else could ‘so how does sex work for your species’ _possibly_ be relevant?”

“I _didn’t_ think. I didn’t _think_ , oh my god,” Shepard groans. “I’m such an idiot. It just didn’t occur to me.”

Nihlus turns to stare at her. It’s interesting how his gaze barely makes her feel uncomfortable anymore. “Really? It didn’t occur to you? Not even once?”

“Well, not until you felt me up in the gym, at least, and then I had a few other things on my mind!”

It takes them a while after that to get a grip on themselves, Shepard ending up resting her forehead on the side of his keel and shaking.

Turian laughter is the best laughter, she’s decided. It spills into so many different layers of sound and fills up the whole space. She can’t believe she’s never heard it before, or noticed it if she had, but now she feels like she can’t get enough. Nihlus’s laugh is so different than humans’, yet there’s a sort of primal familiarity to it. Turns out laughter is just laughter, something that can be shared and delighted in even without a common ancestor. She presses a hand to his chest and smiles sadly into the granite arch of his crest. “My mother would have been so disappointed in me.”

The words slipped out before she even realized that she thought them, and immediately she wishes she could snatch them right back out of the air. Nihlus’s arm tightens around her shoulders. “What makes you say that.”

Shepard shrugs. “She had ideas, you know, about what Mindoir was going to be about. My dad too, but she had this, this vision, I guess. They started a colony to be a part of galactic society, to have a dialog and form relationships with people from all sorts of different planets and walks of life. Earth was too homogeneous, had too much inertia to effect any real change, but on a colony we could start on a clean slate. Build something better socially and technologically from the ground up, with fresh perspectives and experiences and knowledge. She’d have loved the ship, just because of what it stands for.”

Dad had been a botanist, so he’d been on the front line fighting for the Mindoir’s success. She remembered him being happy, in an understated way. She knew he loved his work, remembered his eyes lighting up at some new discovery, what that meant for the future. It was one of the rare times her parents switched roles; Mom was the animated, passionate one, but when Dad got on a roll she’d rest her chin on her hand and look at him with stars in her eyes. The rest of the time it was the other way around, him looking at her as she debated loudly about politics, philosophy, society. Anything that caught her interest, and it seemed to Shepard that everything caught her interest.

It had been Mom who really loved Mindoir, who put her heart and soul into making it grow, who looked at the ugly prefab and alien flora and fauna and saw a home and a future. She shouted down anyone who wanted to restrict entrance to non-human travelers, workers, and merchants. She’d treated Zalessa like her own family on every one of her visits and had had a kind word for everyone no matter what they looked like or where they came from. She believed, completely and universally, that people were people and deserving of compassion and respect, and she spent the majority of her adult life drilling that lesson into her children.

Shepard’s spent most of her adult life mostly trying not to think about her mother.

“She sounds like a great woman.”

Shepard swallows, takes a moment to make sure her voice is steady. “She was. Coming home that day… and she and my dad. And my brother — ” Shepard’s voice trembles and her throat tightens up. Fuck. There’s a reason she doesn’t talk about this shit. “You know, everyone says Mindoir was attacked by Batarian slavers. And they were batarian, mostly. But not exclusively. I remember seeing a few salarians, some asari, a krogan or two. Turians.”

“Batarians were a council race for a long time before humans were discovered. Some ties don’t just dissolve with a closed embassy.”

“Yeah,” Shepard says, wiping her eyes. “I know that, I do. But I was sixteen, and Fen — I just couldn’t. It’s not fair, I know that. I _knew_ that. But I just couldn’t.”

Nihlus doesn’t say anything for a few long moments, but he doesn’t stiffen or pull away, so Shepard lets herself continue to lean against him, trying to shake off the feeling of having flayed herself alive to an audience.

“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Nihlus says eventually. “The things you’ve accomplished since suffering such an unthinkable tragedy… any parent would be proud.”

Shepard very nearly rolls her eyes. “I isolated myself, turned my back on everything my parents stood for and let their murder change me. How could they not be disappointed?” Shepard sighs and rubs her temples. “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to throw myself a pity party. Very not sexy.”

“Well, you already managed to get me in bed, so I think you can relax,” Nihlus says, stroking her back. “And I meant what I said. The work you’ve done in the Attican Traverse keeps a lot of people safe. Even beyond what you did in Elysium, your file is full of glowing reviews from your superiors and testimonials from the people you’ve helped.”

The corner of Shepard's mouth twitches. “So we’re admitting you have a file on me now?”

Nihlus nudges his nose gently at the side of her head. “All I’m saying is that you’ve spent your career preventing other colonies from having to experience the tragedy of your own. That’s admirable, even if you are a little clueless.”

Shepard smacks the back of her hand against his chest. Ow. “Fuck off. I’m working on it, okay? Just as soon as I get off this damn station.”

“Well if nothing else, I’d say you’ve gotten a pretty good head start on that front.”

“Yeah, you would.” She shifts to find a more comfortable way to settle against him. “How did you get started on this anyway? The human thing?”

He shrugs. “I grew up on a merc base, which is about as far from an agrarian farming colony as you can get, I expect. There were a whole lot of kids like me there, with parents that worked for the company. Or had died and were expected to work for the company themselves once they grew up in order to pay the debts they racked up being fed and clothed.

“Is that even legal?”

“Not really, but sometimes there’s a gap between “legal” and “enforceable”. The council doesn’t want to piss off the whole galaxy micromanaging individual planets, if they could even effectively do such a thing, but raising children into indentured servitude is not something they look very favorably on. If enough attention is called to it they’ll crack down, but if a merc band sets up on a space station or some isolated moon in the Attican Traverse, or better yet the Terminus Systems, the chances of someone spending the resources to hassle them is pretty low. Galaxy’s a big place, and the Council isn’t omnipresent.”

Shepard frowns. “Aren’t Spectres supposed to streamline that sort of thing?”

“Yes but sending a Spectre to investigate a shady company is like using a flamethrower to light a candle; a massive waste of resources with a whole lot of collateral damage. Now, if I encountered that sort of thing while on another assignment I’d do my best to put it right — the Council likes its agents to do that sort of thing; good PR, strengthens their presence — but Spectres by design work according to their best judgment and without handholding. Some would handle it differently than I would, and some wouldn’t bother at all, and either way the Council probably wouldn’t even acknowledge it. They have a lot more important things going on.”

“Hmmm,” Shepard hums, absorbing this. “And you grew up in one of these places. Were you one of the kids being brought up to be a merc?”

“Depends on who you ask. The company leaders absolutely thought so. Probably also my dad, but when he died my mother shipped me straight off to the Hierarchy for boot camp. I was not happy about that, to say the least.”

“You wanted to be a merc?”

“I was a kid, I wanted to be around my friends. I’d grown up running around and getting into trouble with a bunch of other bored kids with nothing to do. Boot camp was… an adjustment.”

“I’ll bet.” Boot camp hadn’t exactly been a walk in the park for Shepard either, but at the very least it snapped her out of that formless, mechanical haze that had been her two years at Arcturus Academy. “But how does this tie in to your human fetish?”

“Ha. During one of my first postings after I graduated I ran into one of the girls I’d grown up with. She was a merc herself at that point and seemed happy enough with it. She told me she’d always wanted to know what it would be like to fuck a turian.”

“Wow,” Shepard says. “Just like that, huh.”

“We’d been pretty close at one point, it wasn’t as off the wall as it sounds. And I was just as curious as she was. We went to bed a few times before we went our separate ways and she seemed to enjoy herself, but I don’t think she got the taste for it the way I did.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Shepard drawls.

“Flatterer. I’ve had a little more experience since then.”

“Is it hard? Finding humans who are willing to experiment? Or who are just into it as well, I guess.”

“Easier than you might think, not as easy as I’d like. The trick is to make the approach to people who wont round up a group of their friends to kick the shit out of you if they don’t like your offer.”

Shepard sits up and stares at him. “Jesus, Nihlus.”

“Relax,” he sooths, running a gentle hand up her side. “It was a long time ago, and people like that are pretty rare. I learned to spot them quickly,”

“Still,” Shepard says uncomfortably. “It was a big risk approaching me the way you did. You’re basically locked in here with a bunch of humans, and I could have been some kind of xenophobic asshole.”

Nihlus tips his head to the side, his mandibles spread. “Shepard, I’m a Spectre. I’m respecting com-sec for now because it doesn’t help me to step on more toes than I do just by being here, but if I got into any kind of real trouble now one could stop me from getting out or sending a message.”

“Still…”

“Hey,” he says, cupping her cheek. “The only person I’ve approached is you, and that worked out just fine. I’m not going to go proposition Jenkins in a darkened hallway, so you don’t have to worry about me starting a riot in the middle of a lockdown. Now, that Alenko fellow, on the other hand…”

“Oh my god, don’t even joke about that.” Shepard does her best to commit Nihlus’s current expression to memory; this is how a turian looks when he is trolling the fuck out of her.

“He looks like he has a secret wild side.”

She snorts. “It must be a _very_ well kept secret, then.”

“Probably. He definitely seems to lack your sense of adventure.”

“Most people do, sadly.”

They lull back into a comfortable silence, Shepard with her head propped on Nihlus’s shoulder, tracing the shape of the plates on his chest and stomach. She should probably get back to her own bunk soon. Usually after a hookup Shepard can’t leap out of bed fast enough, but Nihlus is fascinating to talk to and seems genuinely interested in her without being smothering or false. It’s a rare trait in a man.

Shepard sighs. “What time is it?” she asks, against her better judgment. Nihlus snatches his omnitool from the desk and brings it up. Shepard groans. “I am so not going to be able to avoid the walk of shame.”

“The… what?” Nihlus says, looking concerned.

Shepard waves him off. “I guess it’s a human thing. Slinking back home in the middle of the night after a hookup.”

Nihlus is silent for a beat. “This is one of those times when humans are weird about sex, isn’t it.”

“Ha! I guess it is. Does that happen a lot?”

“Sometimes I honestly wonder how you all manage to maintain your population with all the rules you have, let alone grow it.”

“The secret is that we all break the rules. Case in point,” she says, waving between the two of them.

“Whatever works, I suppose. Do you have to go back? Will people be suspicious?”

“Honestly at this point everyone has probably assumed I’m already asleep, and it will raise a lot of really awkward questions when I go back.”

“Then don’t go back,” Nihlus says easily. “Stay the night. We’ll go to breakfast separately.”

Tempting. “Bed’s pretty small for two, especially with the risk of you accidentally poking my eye out.”

“Turians actually tend to sleep sitting up, unless they’re very exhausted or injured. And we sleep a lot more quietly than humans, so I wouldn’t end up poking something hard someplace sensitive. Well, not unless you were up for round two.”

Shepard laughs. “Alright, alright, twist my arm why don’t you.”

The rearrange themselves, winding up with Nihlus sitting up against the wall at the head of the bed and herself tucked between his hip and the other wall. With herself in possession of the single pillow and her head pressed against a soft patch of skin between his hip and his upper thigh, Shepard slings an arm across his leg and is surprised to find herself pretty comfortable. It’s still a little overwarm in the room, but with no clothes and a sheet draped carelessly over her hips she’s comfortable enough. She’s about ready to drift off when there’s a ping from Nihlus’s omnitool.

“Oh fuck off,” she says when he opens it up. “Don’t tell me you’re getting communications in a _communications lockdown_.”

“Perks of being a Spectre,” Nihlus says smugly, scrolling through the message, or data, or whatever the hell it is. She can’t quite see it clearly but its not like she can read the turian alphabet anyway. “Only catch is that they can read anything incoming so I made sure only nonessential messages can get through while I’m here.”

Shepard, who would actually murder someone for the ability to send and receive nonessential messages regardless of who could read them, scowls. Nihlus’s attention is riveted on the holo display, his mandibles doing this weird quivering thing. Shepard reaches up to touch one of them. “Is this good news or bad news.”

“Good news.” He says, catching her hand and pressing it absently to his lips. “Very good news.”

“Do I get to know, or is it just between you and the Arcturus security guys?”

He laughs. “You can know, it’s not terribly secret. Or interesting, for that matter. It’s… sort of a, uh. A pet project, I suppose.”

“A pet project? Like a… wait,” Shepard pushes herself upright, so they’re eye level again. “Are you _embarrassed_?”

Nihlus turns his head to the side, not meeting her eyes. “It’s… a little stupid. Nothing to do with the council at all, just something I keep my eye on when I — ”

“Oh my god, now I _have_ to know.”

Nihlus groans. “It’s _really_ not that big a deal. Especially compared to other things you intimately aware of.” He gestures vaguely between them.

“Yeah, but you’re not the least bit embarrassed about your weird human fetish, and _this_ has you stammering like a schoolgirl. So c’mon, spit it out.”

“Do you know, turians don’t spit? It took me _forever_ to figure out what that idiom means — ”

“Nihlus.”

“All right, all right. It’s… have you heard of the turian Unification wars?”

Shepard frowns. “Nope.”

Nihlus sighs. “Well, like humans, turians started colonizing before making contact with other races, but we were at it a lot longer before we were discovered. A lot of colonies at the time felt that the Hierarchy was an outdated regime, out of touch with the need and realities of the majority of the population. They started distancing themselves, first from Palaven, then from each other. The Hierarchy seemingly ignored the outbreaks of civil wars among its colonies until they cut down their own numbers, at which point the capitol swooped in to crush the remaining resistance. And it’s not taught in school, but there’s a lot of evidence that the Hierarchy deliberately sowed mistrust among the colonies in order escalate conflict so they could play the long game in pacifying them. It’s not a popular theory though because we don’t like to see ourselves as that diabolical.”

“But you think it’s true.”

“It was so long ago, and the waters are so muddied by disinformation and propaganda on all sides that we’ll probably never know for sure, but yes. I do.”

“Interesting. How’s this all connect to your pet project?”

“The Unification Wars, or the Civil Wars, or the Secessionist Wars, or the Colonial Rebellions, or whatever one wants to call them, left a really deep rift in my people’s psyche. Most everyone you talk to — turians, that is, I don’t think anyone else has very strong opinions on a bunch of two thousand year old wars — will say that all that is ancient history, any rift that was left has been long healed, and that we’re all united under a pure meritocracy and have created a near utopic society of well-trained, community focused galactic peacekeepers.”

“I’m gonna take a wild stab in the dark and say you disagree.”

“Perceptive of you. People like to forget that there are turians who live outside of the Hierarchy, but we do exist, whether we’re born that way or it turns out we just don’t fit into the mold others want us to fill. And a lot of us have this kind of… fixation on pre-unification cultures. Their stories and legends and half-remembered customs take on this rosy, mystical element of some better way of living that the Hierarchy denied us and actively sought to destroy when their control was threatened. It’s hard to explain, but the ripples from these dead cultures from thousands of years ago still have a significant effect on our modern culture.”

Shepard thinks of her mother’s celtic knots and her goddess statues and her little holiday altars. She thinks about the Greek myths she learned about in school, whose themes and characters still show up in vids and shows, and she thinks she probably understands. At least a little.

“So you’re… researching these lost colonies?

“Sort of. There were twenty colonies that were so thoroughly wiped out not even their clan markings survived. Which… if you’re not a turian it’s hard to explain how profoundly disturbing that is. My father hated his family and the place he came from, but he wore his markings till the day he died. My mother and her mother were both born and raised outside the Hierarchy but they got and kept their markings, and my mother passed hers down to me. I have good friends who removed theirs and it still unnerves me if I haven’t seen them for a long time.”

“Ah. So you’re trying to track down these twenty lost markings.”

“Seventeen,” Nihlus says, with a clear note of pride. “My father found three during his work with the company. Caused a minor stir among the expats and academia. Even my mother was swept up in the excitement of it, and she doesn’t have a romantic bone in her body. He was sure he could find the rest, kept a staggering amount of notes. My mother gave them to me when I was inducted as a Spectre.”

Shepard grins at him, a little swept up in the excitement. “Oh my god. You’re a _nerd_. The great big badass Spectre is secretly a giant history nerd.”

Nihlus laughs and shields his face with one hand. “Yeah, yeah. You caught me. It just makes me feel closer to him, I guess.”

“I get that.” Shepard smiles, a little sadly. “It’s part of the reason I’ve stuck so close to the colonies. It’s strange to think about, but my parents really loved being farmers. They felt like they were leading some impossible fantasy life. And they were, sort of; they certainly couldn’t have had that sort of life on Earth. It sucked being out there with the wolfpack sometimes. Like, a lot; high stress, lots of boring downtime, close quarters, _no_ privacy. But for every colony I helped or saved I was helping fulfill their dreams, just a little bit.”

There’s a sharp note of bitterness she can’t quite keep out of her tone, and Nihlus runs his fingers through her hair and pulls her forehead to his. “You didn’t want to come here, did you.”

“No,” Shepard says thickly.

“I’m sorry.”

Shepard swallows a few times. “It’s not your fault.

Nihlus makes a noncommittal noise and continues stroking her hair. “Anyway,” he says quietly. “That’s what the message was. I sent a probe out to the Artemis Tau cluster a little while ago and it came back with a couple leads. It’ll be a while before I can get out there and check, but it’ll be nice to think about until I do. A potential new discovery, just waiting for me.”

“How did you even figure out where to look, anyway?”

“Well, it’s complicated because these colonies were so thoroughly wiped out, no trace of them remain in their original systems. A lot of the time I look through historic records of battles and skirmishes, but of course two thousand years ago the star charts were completely different, so I also need to calculate the — ” Nihlus coughs, embarrassed. “This is actually really boring to anyone who isn’t me.”

There is also, Shepard decides, a universal constant in how cute people are when they geek out about the things they love. Shepard presses a kiss to his lips and settles back down by his hip. “Tell me,” she says. “I’m interested.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, shoot.”

Between Nihlus’s nerdery and a second round to top it off, Shepard doesn’t end up getting a whole lot of sleep that night, but it’s worth it. Maybe there’ll be one good thing about this assignment, if she gets to work with him.


	2. Epilogue

“What the hell is that ship?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean I’m not an expert, but I’ve never seen anything even remotely like that. How is a ship that size even capable of landing in atmo?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are they after, anyway? The Prothean artifact? Do we have a leak?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

Shepard slams her locker closed and whirls on him. “Is there anything you _do_ know, Nihlus? Any small, minuscule, _tiny_ piece of information you haven’t shared with me? Because now would be the fucking time.”

“Look, Shepard, I’m sorry for springing that on you, but nothing about this is set in stone and I needed time to make an assessment — ”

“Oh, is _that_ what we’re calling it.”

“Shepard,” Nihlus says quietly, stepping forward and putting a hand on her shoulder. Shepard shoots a few furtive looks around them, but the out of the way corner they’re standing in is quiet and everyone else is running around, focused on the mission. No one is looking at them. “That wasn’t part of this. That was just us. But I still need to do my job, and that meant I couldn’t tell you right away.”

Shepard clenches her fists, but doesn’t step out of his touch. “I hate not knowing things,” she says fiercely. “I can’t make good decisions if I don’t have all the information, and if I can’t make good decisions, people die. If we’re going to work together, I need to know you’re not going to pull this ‘need to know’ crap on me again. I won’t be kept in the dark, Nihlus.”

“You have my word. But right now you know as much as I do about what we’re walking into. The most likely scenario is that whoever they are, they’re after the artifact. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how much we cannot afford a hostile unknown party getting their hands on it.”

“That you do not. Shit, what a shitshow.” Shepard takes a deep breath. “Okay, we’re going to stick close and move fast. I’ll take point and Alenko will take the rear, so we’ll be covered by biotics in case of any nasty surprises — ”

“I’m going ahead on my own.”

Shepard’s head snaps up to glare at him. “The fuck you are. You just said you have no more idea what’s going on than I do.”

“Which is more or less standard operating procedure for a Spectre. I need to be able to pay attention to my surroundings without looking over my shoulder.”

Shepard takes a step back, feeling like she’s just been slapped. “You’re the one who put me up for this. You’re the one who said we’d be working together. The ‘first of several missions together’. Your words.”

“And I meant them, but the situation’s changed — ”

“If I’m competent enough for you to put me forward for Spectre candidacy, I am competent enough to watch your back!”

“It’s not you I’m worried about!” Shepard blinks up at him, and it’s his turn to look around to see if anyone noticed his raised voice. He leans toward her and says more quietly. “If it was just you, I’d take the chance. But I’m too used to working on my own and the other two humans are to unpredictable for me to worry about right now.”

“They’re good people,” Shepard frowns, crossing her arms. “We’ll watch your back.”

“Alenko seems like he has a good head on his shoulders, but Jenkins is much to green for my tastes. And jumpy.”

“If this is about some dumb shit he said in the mess one day — ”

“Shepard,” Nihlus snaps. “This is my job. I’ve been doing it for a long time, and when the stakes are this high I need to be able to do it my way. You of all people should understand that.”

Shepard growls with frustration and reaches out to grip his arm. “I do,” She says. “I do, but you shouldn’t go alone if you can help it. I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Nihlus. You’ve got backup. You should use it.”

“Next time,” Nihlus says softly. “It’ll just be you and me. You’ll see what we can do without anyone holding us back. Alright?”

Shepard presses her lips tight together. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

“ETA in five minutes,” announces Joker over the PA system. “Ground team report to the cargo hold ASAP.”

“That’s our cue,” Shepard says, but before she can make her way to the elevator, Nihlus catches her by the waist and pulls her close. She cups his jaw as he kisses her, running her thumbs over the rough arch of his mandibles, and he runs his fingers through her hair a few times before pulling away.

“Time to go to work.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has literally been ten years in the making, ever since I first played ME1 and decided that Shepard had had a brief yet intense affair with Nihlus, and viewed that playthrough and every subsequent one through the lens of her private grief. My Shepards have grown and evolved and changed since then, with new names and a deeper understanding of who they are with each subsequent iteration. Skye has turned out to be a much different character than I started out making, and I love her for it. Similarly this story has turned out very different from my original idea, but it's much better for it and the heart of that feeling of my first playthrough runs all through it's core.
> 
> This is one of the fics whose draft I completed during Camp Nano July 2017. I still have SO MANY WORKS from that time that still need to be typed up and edited, and I was kind of shocked at how long this fic ended up being. It's not the biggest fic I finished by a long shot and I'm starting April Camp Nano _tomorrow_. It's gonna be a wild ride.


End file.
